Microsoft's Copilot push in India

The Copilot push 

Following his meeting with the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi in New Delhi, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft announced an investment of $3 billion over the next 2 years in India for cloud and AI infrastructure including additional data centres to accelerate AI usage. At the Bengaluru leg of the Microsoft AI tour, he also upped the target under the ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA initiative (Microsoft’s Skills for Jobs program) to train 10 million more Indians with essential AI skills by 2030. In February last year, Nadella announced plans to train 2 million people in AI skills by 2025 under the initiative, which it has already surpassed. According to the company, 2.4 million individuals have already been trained in AI skills.

With GenAI integration into its offerings through its platforms, (Copilot, Copilot & AI stack and Copilot devices), Satya Nadella called Copilot the ‘UI of AI’ where it would become an important interface where many agents are doing autonomous work. “The approach we have taken is to build the copilot into the existing workflow,” he said. Microsoft is also building GenAI agents within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, such as project management agents, interpretation agents, and SharePoint agents for more efficient ways of working within enterprises. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio also allows developers to create their agents through its low-code, no-code platform. Pointing out the results inside Microsoft with the use of Copilot, “We are already seeing fantastic results inside of Microsoft. We are baking in double-digit strong improvements to productivity across every business process” Satya added. According to the company, the use of a copilot in various departments such as in sales has resulted in 9.4% higher revenue per seller 20% more deal closures and a 5% reduction in external regulatory spending in the legal department. Copilot’s use has also seen 11.5% faster resolution of customer service cases and 42% greater accuracy in answering employee queries within the human resources department. Microsoft’s copilot adoption partners in the tech services sector includes large firms such as Infosys, HCLtech, TechM, LTIMindtree, Wipro, Cognizant and banks such as BoB, Federal Bank, YesBank and PSU companies like IOC, ONGC and even government of India’s MyGov citizen engagement platform MyGov. 

Microsoft’s subsidiary Github, a developers platform which has nearly 17 million Indian developers, is also seeing active participation of Indian developers in over 30598 open source AI projects, next to the USA. The recently launched free GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code has also taken off in a big way in India Satya added.

“Humans and a swarm of AI agents the next frontier,”

At a curated list of business leaders connect including Daisy Chittilapilly, President Cisco India & Saarc, Saurabh Kumar Sahu, Managing Director & Lead - India Business, Accenture, Chetan Maini co-founder Sun Mobility, Arun Jain CMD Intellect Design, VCs and startup founders, Satya Nadella also called on the CEOs of companies to use and diffuse AI into every aspect of work within the organisation and let AI make a material difference.

Nandan Nilekani, chairman, Infosys in his conversation with Satya pointed out that with a tech-savvy government, a large population that has seamlessly adopted technology and an approach which has the right balance between responsible AI and innovation, “I think India will be the use case capital of AI in the world” he said. Infosys has had a deep engagement with Microsoft for over two decades and also uses the Microsoft Azure platform for its AI and ML use cases. However when deploying AI at scale and for its wider application “ Inference costs have to be super frugal because you're gonna have a billion people doing all kinds of queries or agenting stuff and it has to work at that scale” Nandan added.

Satya also sees AI bringing a big change in the way SaaS works, where it would not be about going from one Saas application to another but going to an agent that will orchestrate across multiple SaaS applications. “A lot of the business logic will move to a new tier, which then will be a multi-agent tier that needs to be orchestrated”.With AI agents driving enterprise consumption and playing a major role in productivity gains, Satya said “ Humans and a swarm of agents. I think, is the next frontier”.