Microsoft chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella on February 7 said that this is the first time India's fast growth in artificial intelligence (AI) is bridging its gap with the rest of world. He was speaking with top Indian CEOs at Microsoft CEO Connection in Mumbai.
Nadella highlighted four big shifts in the world of technology since the time he joined the industry. These include PCs, client servers, web and of course mobile and cloud.
Referring to the current AI revolution, Nadella said: “This is first time I feel what is happening in India and the rest of the world there is no gap. If anything, the use cases here are so unique and paving their own path.”
"We don't just talk about AI, we're scaling AI," he added.
He also said India is one of the fastest growing markets in the world and the technology giant is closely tracking the percentage of AI contribution to its GDP growth which is targeted to reach $5 trillion by 2025.
Nadella highlighted AI potential and growth in India citing examples of the company’s Copilot offering being adopted across companies and Indian IT services giants including HCLTech, LTIMindtree and Infosys.
He cited Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) data to say that out of the country's India’s $5-trillion GDP by 2025, around $500 billion will be driven by AI.
Nadella also announced that Microsoft is going to provide AI skilling opportunities to 2 million people in India by 2025.
“For the last 70 years, we continuously increased our digitisation on people, places and things… Now we have a new capability of making sense of that digitisation, a new reasoning engine, a neural digitisation engine, which has completely revolutionised the tech stack,” he said.
“This ultimately going to have an impact on the GDP. India is one of the highest growing markets. We see the buoyancy of it wherein the government and the people have high ambitions of what’s going to happen by 2025. And what percentage of that GDP growth is actually going to be driven by AI, is what we all are going to track."
The Microsoft chief is on his annual India visit and is expected to be in Bengaluru on February 8. The focus of his tour is set on AI and its opportunities. He is also likely to meet India’s prominent AI start-ups, including Sarvam, Bhavish Aggarwal's AI startup Krutrim, and a few early stage AI start-ups in Bengaluru.
Nadella’s words come a week after Microsoft India and South Asia President Puneet Chandok called India to be unstoppable especially with the ongoing AI shift. He was speaking at Microsoft’s very first edition of its AI Tour in India, where the company demoed several of its AI and Copilot offerings to customers.
Chandok had highlighted three major strengths of the India market. According to him, there are nearly 100 startups coming up in India every day which will drive demand for companies like Microsoft for running operations. The county also has AI expertise in terms of huge numbers of developers which will help with talent supply. Additionally, roughly 16 percent of the global GDP is expected to be driven by India this year, he said.
On AI regulations
When asked on the scope of cooperation between India and the United States on coming up with AI regulations, Nadella said, "I think it's imperative especially for India and the United States to be able to cooperate, what are the norms, what are the regulations even, instead of fracturing them."
As of FY23, Microsoft India reported a 30.2 percent growth in net profit on a year-on-year basis, driven by the uptick in adoption of the company’s software and services by Indian enterprises during the pandemic years.
Profit for the period stood at Rs 648.67 crore. Consolidated revenue for FY23 stood at Rs 19,353.79 crore, growing 39% YoY, up from Rs 13,922 crore in FY22, according to the company’s filings sourced from Tofler.
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