India will be unstoppable with global AI shift, says Microsoft’s Puneet Chandok

The second strength is India’s AI expertise which drives supply. “Every 6th AI researcher, AI builder, AI developer is coming from India,” Chandok said. Thirdly, this will have an impact on the world’s GDP as “roughly 16 percent of the global GDP is expected to be driven by India this year,” he said.

This comes a week before Microsoft’s Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s annual India visit on February 7th and 8th, with his focus set on artificial intelligence (AI) and its opportunities.

Moneycontrol's sources said some of India’s prominent AI start-ups including Sarvam, Bhavish Aggarwal's AI startup Krutrim, and a few early-stage AI start-ups are likely to meet Nadella in Bengaluru.

A few weeks back, in an internal email, Microsoft India and South Asia’s President Puneet Chandok said that Nadella’s visit reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to applying technology to expand opportunities in the country.

“AI is playing a game-changing role in shaping ‘India’s Techade’ and will make India and South Asia one of the most exciting markets for technology,” the email said.

Last month, Microsoft Asia’s president Ahmed Mazhari told Moneycontrol in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, that technology companies from India have immense opportunity to become enablement engines at this seminal moment of AI.

“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 had 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.”