Microsoft to provide AI skilling to 2 mn Indians by 2025: Satya Nadella

Microsoft chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella on Wednesday emphasised the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in driving economic growth in India. He also announced an initiative to train around 2 million people in India with AI skills.

“I'm very excited to announce a new initiative around skilling. We are going to equip over 2 million people in India with AI skills," Nadella said.

At the end of the day, taking the workforce and making sure they have the skills in order to be able to thrive in the new age is the most important thing that any of us can do. It is not just the skills but it is also the jobs that get created, he said.

Nadella who was speaking with top Indian CEOs at Microsoft CEO Connection in Mumbai. also highlighted how Microsoft Copilot, along with the company’s other AI solutions, is driving measurable productivity gains for people and organisations by helping them complete work faster and with superior quality. For instance, recent research on early users of Copilot for Microsoft 365 found that they were 29 percent faster in a series of tasks, including searching, writing, and summarising.

"India is uniquely positioned to make the promise of AI a reality," said Nadella. "We are committed to partnering broadly across the public and private sector to help close the nation's AI skills gap and create new opportunity throughout the country."

Many organisations in India are already boosting their productivity and accelerating innovation using Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot.  For example, Axis Bank, the first bank in India to adopt Copilot for Microsoft 365 at enterprise scale, with 300 users and counting. It has seen productivity gains of more than 30 per cent in daily work thanks to Copilot.

Likewise Indian IT majors Infosys, HCL Tech and LTIMindtree have also partnered with Microsoft to boost their operations. Say, Infosys has been an early adopters of GitHub Copilot in India. More than 7,000 of the firm’s developers are using GitHub Copilot to tap into the power of AI and innovate at the speed of thought. LTIMindtree built a Copilot for Microsoft 365 plugin for Teams to optimise staff management.

Organisations in India are seeing an average $3.86 return for every US dollar spent on AI projects, and more than 150 organisations are already innovating with Azure OpenAI Service across industries such as agriculture, aviation, ecommerce, and fast-moving consumer goods. For instance, ITC, a diversified Indian conglomerate, developed the innovative chatbot Krishi Mitra for farmers. Arvind Limited, a denim manufacturer, expects to save 60 per cent of time spent analysing annual reports with its Annual Report Copilot and Air India deployed a generative AI virtual agent called AI.g. It has successfully answered over half a million customer queries since its launch in March 2023, and manages over 6,000 queries a day in four languages. More recently, Karya, an Indian social impact organisation, partnered with Microsoft to create new data sets in local languages, while creating new economic opportunities for people in rural India. 

With India’s GDP expected to reach $500 billion by 2025, the role of AI in driving this growth cannot be overstated. Not just Microsoft, big techs including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta have been highlighting the role of enterprise artificial intelligence in monetising their AI ambitions. At the recent earning reports, AI-powered services drove revenue gains for Microsoft's Azure AI, Alphabet's Google Workspace and Google Cloud, and Amazon's Amazon Web Services.