The adoption of artificial intelligence in India is on par with the rest of the world, Microsoft Corp. chief executive Satya Nadella said on Wednesday, adding that the Silicon Valley giant will provide AI skills to 2 million people in the country.
Nadella, who has been at Microsoft for 32 years and has completed 10 years as its CEO, said to a room full of Indian business executives that he had closely watched four previous platform shifts in computer technology—personal computers, the internet, mobile devices, and cloud computing.
However, with AI, it was the first time he had seen India keeping pace with the rest of the world during a platform shift.
“This is the first time I feel what’s happening in India and what’s happening in the rest of the world—there is no impedance, there is no gap,” he said, as he pitched Microsoft’s AI prowess.
“If anything, the use cases here are so unique… and are paving their own path. And that’s what’s exciting. We’re not just talking about AI, we’re scaling AI,” he said about the adoption of AI in India.
Nadella is on his annual visit to India and will be rubbing shoulders with top business magnates and technocrats. Interestingly, the guest list for Wednesday’s event was put together by Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, said Puneet Chandok, the company’s president for India and South Asia.
Nadella drew attention to the Indian electronics and IT ministry’s estimate that AI could add around $500 million to India’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025 as the country reaches its aspiration of becoming a $5 trillion economy. India’s nominal GDP is currently pegged at $3.7 trillion.
The Microsoft boss drew parallels to the industrial revolution era in Great Britain, where laying rail roads–the revolutionizing technology of the day–accounted for as much as 10% of the GDP.
“When you have a new general purpose technology, how intensely you invest in deploying it across sectors inside the economy makes a difference to a country’s prospects going forward,” Nadella said.
The Indian-origin business leader, widely credited for turning Microsoft around with the launch of the Azure cloud computing platform, evangelized the importance of AI to the future of businesses.
He said that just as personal computers drastically improved productivity in the workplace, so will AI.
“This age of AI is really expertise at your fingertips,” Nadella said. “Think what happened to forecasting. Before PCs, before emails and spreadsheets, how did we do forecasting? And then how did the business process of forecasting change? Same thing is happening now.”
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Published: 07 Feb 2024, 03:17 PM IST