Microsoft India President foresees India as major beneficiary in global AI shift

India will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global artificial intelligence (AI) shift, driven by the demand, supply side strengths and GDP opportunity in the country, Microsoft India and South Asia’s President Puneet Chandok said on January 31, coming a week before CEO Satya Nadella’s annual India visit.

Chandok was speaking at Microsoft’s first-ever edition of its global AI Tour in India, which took place in Mumbai.

“India is not just incredible, it’s unstoppable. It is our time to shine. AI is a massive platform shift, it’s a defining technology shift for a lifetime. The impact it will have on our lives are incredible and finally, you’ll get to use co-pilot integrated with your emails, Word doc and more,” he said.

Chandok highlighted three major strengths of the India market. According to him, with nearly “100 new startups coming up in India every day”, it brings a huge ‘demand’ for companies like Microsoft as all of them will require technology and AI to run operations.

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.” Moneycontrol