Tech giant Microsoft aims to build a thriving artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem in India by supporting the government and industry in fostering AI innovation and enhancing productivity, efficiency and accessibility. For the purpose, it has tied-up with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the IndiaAI Mission. It has also announced partnerships with companies like RailTel, Apollo Hospitals, Bajaj Finserv, Mahindra Group and upGrad, to accelerate AI driven transformations. Puneet Chandok, President, India and South Asia, Microsoft told businessline that India is truly becoming an AI powerhouse. Edited excerpts:
I think we have already started… India is truly becoming AI powerhouse…. AI is out of the labs. We have entered a five-year partnership to look at Railways, public sector institutions and try digital transformation, Cloud AI. Skilling is part of our broader commitment of $3 billion of infrastructure and AI and data centres in India. We are looking at skilling 10 million people. I think upGrad is another partner where we are going to skill people and certify people on GenAI together. Look at the Mahindra Group, we have got agriculture, farms, auto and really thinking about digital transformation. We have Bajaj Finance as a partner for more than 15 years, strengthening it with more digital transactions; Apollo Hospitals – around Co-pilots with doctors, research together, building products and solutions, not only for India but for the world. Microsoft today has 800+ customers in India on Azure Open AI, 10x growth in Copilots are in AI agents and 70 per cent plus customers are seeing productivity improvement. We are seeing almost doubling of customers satisfaction in a lot of cases. For every dollar being spent on GenAI they are seeing $5 of impact. As Microsoft, we are excited not just about these investments, but in everything we are doing in the country. Microsoft is becoming the home for India to build AI.
How much can you scale up to from here – from 800 plus customers – in the next one year or so?
We are just getting started. With these 800 customers, the thrust is on how we make sure that the work that they are doing truly scales and delivers them back. How do we make sure that there is impact on their topline, how do they see their return on investment (RoI). We want to make sure that there is deep understanding of AI in these customers. They are driving extensibility, which is their linking of Copilots to different systems… I think every sector is being invented and reinvented so as to get these customers to come and build AI on us. So that’s the mission.
How is Microsoft engaging in government projects, especially when it comes to areas like Defence and security?
We are super excited to work with the AI Mission. That has three elements that I am excited about – one is training 500,000 people. If I go back to training 10 million people and two million in India as announced by Satya (Nadella) in February last year, I am amazed that we have already reached 2.4 million and that is why we have extended the 10-million people to five years. More than 60 per cent of these 2.4 million are women and more than 70 per cent of them come from tier-II and III cities. We are setting up AI centres of excellence so that we can get these use cases to life and setting up these AI Productivity Labs in 20 National Skill Training Institutes (NSTIs)/NIELIT centres in 10 States to impart foundational courses for 20,000 educators. That is an incredible opportunity for us to work with the government and make the AI Mission a reality… it’s building the tech, getting the demand going and building the human talent, which is where our focus is.
When it comes to AI, we can’t ignore deepfakes, so what kind of measures do you have in mind when you are launching such projects?
When you are building technology that can change the world, you have to build it responsibly. I think Satya said this beautifully, “There is no franchise value in tech. We have to earn our right every day.” The intent is security by design and by default, and a set of principles that we are building on, which is transparency, safety, removing biases and making sure that everything that we are designing has those principles embedded in. It’s not an afterthought. We are fully committed to responsible AI.
One of your biggest businesses is data centres and you have partners like Reliance Jio. Data centres consume a lot of power (electricity), so how are you preparing for that?
We have date centres in three regions and we are building the fourth one. With Jio, we have a partnership called Jio Azure where they are building the infrastructure with us. And, again, the intent is to scale this going by the demand signals… Satya has also spoken about tokens per dollar per watt. We have a commitment till 2030 which is when we will be carbon neutral, water positive and even zero waste. That’s the commitment that we have made globally and in India, we are fully aligned to that commitment. In fact, we have got partnerships with ReNew and Amplus (part of Gentari). All our new data centres are already coming up with zero water wastage. So, we are also constantly innovating our technology with AI to make these data centres even more sustainable.
The government has recently released the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules for comments from the stakeholders. What will be your submission?
We constantly work with the government. In fact, our mandate is to bring best practices, ideas, have conversations and share our inputs. So, even for the Digital Data Protection Act, we have been deeply engaged with the government and with the industry bodies like Nasscom and CII, to make sure that the industry point of view is heard. We will continue to play our role there.
