Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has stated that his business wants to be the “copilot” for India as it begins to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI). Copilot is Microsoft’s AI-powered digital assistant, comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“I want us to be the co-pilot for India as it takes advantage of AI, creates its own AI products across all of these sectors, and exports them to the world,” Nadella said in an interview with CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan at Microsoft’s “CEO Connection” event in Mumbai on February 7.
Nadella arrived in Mumbai earlier in the day for a two-day visit, a yearly routine, with the subject for 2024 being AI and the potential it brings. He is expected in Bengaluru on February 8.
According to Satya Nadella, India has a fantastic chance to leverage general-purpose technologies such as AI and generative AI across a wide range of public and commercial sectors and across industries.
Microsoft will continue to invest in India on two fronts: as a source of human capital for global product production and as a source of “latest and greatest” equipment for clients such as information technology service providers.
The Indian-origin CEO also stated that AI is transforming economic productivity and that he has never seen a general-purpose technology with such a broad influence.
According to him, software development and frontline employment in retail and healthcare are two industries experiencing rapid growth. According to Nadella, rural immigrants moving to cities utilize AI to obtain services.
“I was very stunned… on seeing how some of the leading model work we had done was diffusing in India, and even in something like the public sector,” Nadella said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.
Nadella stated that one advantage of this generation of AI is that it decreases the learning curve in response to a question about job losses caused by technology. “So even for somebody displaced mid-career, you can pick up new skills faster, easier,” he said.
If the previous age was about “information at your fingertips,” the AI era is about “expertise at your fingertips” in industries like retail and healthcare.
He predicted that wages would rise as non-experts took on more expert jobs. “They may have domain expertise but they may not have all the knowledge and so therefore, I think that they could even be better wage-supported new jobs,” Nadella said in a statement.
Job displacement, however, is unavoidable when a new technology enters the market, he added. “But I also am very optimistic that we even have both the policy tools and the actual tools to help us manage this transition in a net positive way for even a country like India,” Nadella said in a prepared statement.
