Satya Nadella highlights potential of AI in India's growth; Microsoft to train 2 million Indians in AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is on a two days visit to India on February 7th and 8th. During his keynote in Mumbai, Nadella emphasised on the potential of AI in driving the economic growth in India.

He also highlighted how popular Indian brands are already reaping the benefits of AI, including Microsoft’s own AI tool for organisations and users called Copilot.

“You can only talk about tech as a real thing if it is going to have a real impact on the overall growth of an economy. Definitely today this is the highest growth market. You can see the buoyancy of it. The government and all of you have high ambitions of what’s going to happen by 2025 and what percentage of that growth is going to be driven by AI”, Nadella said.

Adopting AI

While talking on the adoption of AI, Nadella drew a parallel between Industrial Revolution and Artificial Intelligence. He mentioned that investment and deploying it cross-sectorally into an economy makes a difference to a country’s prospects.

“In the United Kingdom, during the height of the Industrial Revolution, they spent 10% of GDP on the railroad system and the rest is history. When you have a new general-purpose technology, how intensely you invest and deploy cross-sectorally inside an economy, I think, makes a difference to a country’s prospects going forward.”

His excitement over being at the early stages of this adoption cycle while scaling it underscore the potential of AI in transforming economies and the importance of investing in this technology for future growth.

AI training in India

He further announced that the company will train more than two million people in India in generative AI skills, to address talent shortage in the AI era.

"We are happy to play our role in it. But it's not just the skills but also the jobs that will get created with AI," Nadella told the gathering.