Adopt AI, don’t sit on sidelines: Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to CEOs

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella, on a two-day visit to India, on Wednesday urged India Inc not to be on the sidelines as the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution took shape.

Addressing India’s top CEOs in Mumbai, the Indian-born chief executive, who recently completed a decade at the helm of the global tech major, said the country’s business leaders should ramp up efforts on AI to create their own use cases and see the impact, rather than depending on mere studies to see the impact.

He referred to AI as a powerful new technology that needed to be “diffused” fast to every corner of the world so that there was equal distribution of economic growth.

Comparing the current AI evolution to the era when personal computers (PCs) were coming up, Nadella said: “I feel the AI age is similar to the PC age. PC brought information to our fingertips, AI is bringing expertise to our fingertips. And with Copilot, this is evident in the productivity gains.”

For instance, recent research on early users of Copilot for Microsoft 365 found that they were 29 per cent faster in a series of tasks, including searching, writing, and summarising. 

 

At the CEO Connection event, Nadella announced that Microsoft would provide 2 million people in India with AI skills by 2025 through its ADVANTA(I)GE India Initiative. The AI engineering talent in India is second only to the US, said Nadella. The initiative is part of Microsoft’s broader commitment to accelerate India’s AI transformation.

 

He said AI could help boost gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the country, and called India as one of the highest growth markets.

When it comes to the four big shifts that happen in the technology world — PCs, client servers, internet, mobile and Cloud, and AI adoption — there is hardly any gap between India and the world, he said.

“This is the first time, I feel, (between) what is happening in India and the rest of the world, there is no impedance or gap… if anything, the use cases in India that are talked about are so unique that they are paving their own path, and what’s exciting is that we are not just talking AI but also scaling AI,” Nadella told the CEOs.

He cited the instance of how Karya, which started as a Microsoft Research project and was spun off later, was helping create high-quality language datasets in several Indian languages while simultaneously empowering poor and rural Indians. 

Nadella also said there was a need for better cooperation between India and the US on AI regulations and norms. “…I think it’s imperative, especially for India and the US, to be able to cooperate — on norms, regulations even, instead of fracturing them,” Nadella said.

What is driving this shift towards AI — which had not happened in many years — is the natural user interface and cognitive engine, he said. “The dream of the early founders of AI was to create computers that understand us, instead of us trying to understand computers. I feel that we have arrived there with natural language,” he said.

Nadella said the world had finally got a user interface paradigm that was going to change the way people used computers and what computers they needed.

He said these two big shifts in AI would also have an impact on GDP. “India is one of the highest growth markets and you see it in buoyancy. The government and all of you have high ambitions… What percentage of GDP growth comes from AI will be worth tracking,” he added.

Indian IT players using Copilot

On the adoption of AI in India, Nadella said firms like Infosys, HCLTech, and LTIMindtree, were using Copilot not only for clients but also to internally customise the technology.

Infosys, he said, was one of the biggest use cases of Github Copilot. In the case of HCLTech and LTIMindtree, they are integrating Copilot into their work systems.

“Firm-level differences will start to show up, especially in tech in the short order if you are not an early adopter (of AI). That’s why we are seeing the IT services companies in India going fast and furious on it,” Nadella said.

First Published: Feb 07 2024 | 1:20 PM IST