“India's scale is part of the story, but not the full story”: Microsoft’s Puneet Chandok on the AI adoption story in India

Microsoft’s latest annual Work Trend Index 2026 report, which captures changing work trends across the globe, points at India having double the global average of AI users who qualify as Frontier Professionals— those who actively use AI agents to change the way they work or for complex tasks.

The survey conducted across 10 markets including Australia, US, UK, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan covering nearly 20,000 full-time employed or self-employed knowledge workers; 32% of India's AI users were frontier users compared to the global average of 16% and 78% of Indian users doing work that was not possible a year ago compared with 58% globally. This is also being enabled by leadership alignment - Indian managers not just openly using AI themselves but also getting their teams to use it , the statistic for India stands at 44% verses 26% globally.

Given India’s large knowledge worker talent pool, including 27 million GitHub users, the largest and fastest-growing developer communities in the world, Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India & South Asia says though the country benefits from talent pool, and a globally significant IT services industry- India's scale is part of the story, but not the full story. He says that Indian professionals are really going deep into AI and using AI is not something which is just because of the scale, but because, “they have the hunger, the appetite, they see the value They believe AI can help them leapfrog” he says.

Another key factor is that has also aided large scale AI adoption is the culture of experimentation. With organizations willing to adopt new solutions if it brings tangible value, Puneet also noted that India's relatively lower dependence on legacy technology infrastructure has also helped accelerate adoption.

More importantly, Indian business leaders are viewing AI as a strategic opportunity for growth. According to Chandok, the question that is "front and centre in India" is: "How can I really use AI to drive ROI? How can I truly generate alpha for my enterprise, for my employees, for my customers?".

The use increased adoption at enterprise level has seen frontier model companies push their own models and agentic ecosystem with newer companies such as Anthropic and Open AI set up business offices in India and exploring partnerships.

Those with decades of presence in India geography, such as Microsoft, have also accelerated push for copilot adoption and commit billions in investment for accelerated adoption. In December 2025, during his second visit to India in calendar year, Satya Nadalla, CEO Microsoft announced the largest investment in Asia, where the company would look at investing $17.5 billion over four years (CY 2026 to 2029).

This is in addition to an earlier $3 billion dollars years in India for cloud and AI infrastructure including additional data centres to accelerate AI usage and train 10 million more Indians with essential AI skills by 2030. In June this year, the company has also struck deals with three leading IT companies — Infosys, TCS and Wipro — to rollout Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to over 100,000 employees in each company.

As AI projects move from pilot to deployment, the focus as Chandok says the conversation around AI in enterprises is rapidly moving beyond focus on costs. Though reducing AI expenses remains important, companies are increasingly looking at how AI can deliver measurable business value with token getting cheaper.

At the same time, businesses are recognizing that there is no single model that can solve every problem. Chandok noted that while most organizations are not betting on any single models, I think there's a clear realization that you need an open, heterogeneous, diverse ecosystem of models to work for you. There's also a realization that you should use a frontier model for a non-frontier problem,” he said.