Satya Nadella calls for 'AI-first mindset' as Microsoft unveils major push in India

As a part of his second AI tour in 2025, Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, called on software builders to embrace a mindset change as the world gears up for frontier technologies. Addressing a room full of developers and tech executives, Nadella said that in the AI era, Microsoft is aligning its platform to be able to empower people, organisations and have a real-world impact.

“One of the most exciting things is the change in the approach to how we build these systems. Unlike any previous period of software, this one requires a rethink in even the lifecycle of how we build.”

Pointing at the platform level innovation, enabling a seamless experience of co-pilot or other agents being able to assist users with tasks, drawing inputs from across its offerings, it is the company’s partner ecosystem that is now leading the adoption of co-pilot at an enterprise level scale. “There is a great momentum in this country in terms of these applications getting deployed deeply”, Nadella added, announcing the licensing of two lakh Co-pilot between four IT services and consulting companies, namely Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro.

Also, with large Indian companies such as Adani enterprises, Aditiya Birla capital, Mahindra as well as startups like Kore.ai, Groww, Meesho now building applications, models, multi-agent framework on Azure using the AI offerings such as Microsoft Fabric, Foundry Local, “Agent 365 runtime is going to be the key organising layer uh in a multi- agent and an agentic world, and we are very excited about the progress. You'll have full observability, compliance, governance of agents, and we're seeing tremendous momentum on all of this,” Nadella added.

Reiterating the company’s commitment to building AI infrastructure in the company's fastest AI adopting region, Microsoft has already announced an additional $17.5 billion over the next four years. This investment is in addition to the $3 billion investment announced in January of this year, which the company plans to deploy over the next two years for building cloud and AI infrastructure in India. The total sum is also its largest sum, being spent on setting up the next-gen tech infrastructure in the Asia region. “To me, at the end of the day, this is all about empowering every person and every organisation in India to be able to achieve more. And in that context, it starts with the human capital of this country, being skilled, being confident, that they can do things to achieve more, drive their organisation, their communities, their cities, their states forward,” he added.