Davos 2024: AI creates immense opportunity for India, says Microsoft Asia’s Ahmed Mazhari

Ahmed Mazhari, President, Asia, Microsoft

Technology companies from India have immense opportunity to become enablement engines at this seminal moment of artificial intelligence (AI), Ahmed Mazhari, President, Asia, Microsoft told Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

This comes days after IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that India will be at the forefront of AI deployment.

“This seminal moment of AI creates this immense opportunity for tech companies in India to be the ‘enablement engine’ of not only domestic companies in the country, but think about the work being done by the likes of Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, TCS, or even Tech Mahindra in our space,” Mazhari said.

He added, “We as a company are confident to back these companies, to train them, to skill them, to offer the IP so that they can help implement AI for customers in North America, Europe, and different parts of the world.”

Mazhari shared that he was able to meet many Indian CEOs including delegates from the IT and tech industry body the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), over the past few days at WEF.

“The dialogue around has been how the Indian tech industry was born around the Y2K (Year 2000) moment, which was a period in time where something had to be done and that laid the foundation for transformation in the tech stack,” he said.

Gen AI collaboration with Indian government

Microsoft has also been closely working with the government of India to offer its generative AI capabilities. In May 2023, it launched Jugalbandi, a multilingual chatbot powered by generative AI, which could be accessed through WhatsApp. The chatbot was designed to reach rural areas in India that had limited media access and a lack of information about government welfare activities.

Mazhari shared that within months of the chatbot being made available in the market, farmers were able to communicate and engage on areas like subsidies or when to grow certain crops, etc.

“We have just launched a small project in Baramati, called Farms of the Future. And what is fascinating is that in a very controlled experiment, we're seeing the ability to drive much higher levels of productivity. For instance, for tomatoes, we believe that in a certain acreage, AI versus non-AI farming, we could see between 30 to 50% increase in productivity of the plant,” he said.

Hiring plans in Asia

While overall tech companies have remained optimistic about future growth, they have simultaneously also continued laying off employees like in Google.

When asked about Microsoft’s hiring plans in India, Mazhari said, “Our business is to enable our consumers and our customers to have great success. So we're putting the right resources with our customers. Some of our customers are working with us on proof of concept. Some of them are scaling them. So we're aligning our resources to match the opportunity,” he said.

He added, “I would encourage Indian CEOs and Indian industries to grab this opportunity. Because this opportunity is shaping at a pace that we have not seen in the past. And companies like Microsoft and others in the ecosystem are very eager to help, enable and learn.”