Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pitches India’s AI sovereignty
Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, which he says is reflective of where the technology is going and its impact
New Delhi: Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Satya Nadella on Wednesday lauded India’s ability to successfully lock in what he calls a virtuous cycle that includes policy, programs, technology stack and the broader market for artificial intelligence (AI) and made a pitch for the tech giant’s AI and Microsoft 365 suite for consumers as well as enterprises.
In a keynote during his visit to India, he also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, which he says is reflective of where the technology is going and its impact, and stressed on the importance of giving organisations in India control over their data, offering a spectrum of options including Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Sovereign Cloud, ensuring data governance and regulatory compliance, with local storage.
Microsoft has announced a $17.5 billion investment in India– its largest yet in Asia – over the next four years to build AI infrastructure. Nadella met PM Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday.
“We will help skill 20 million people in India for AI,” said Nadella, announcing the company’s commitment, which will focus on smaller towns as well.
In recent days, Nadella has noted that Microsoft’s size as an organisation has become a “massive disadvantage” at a time when building AI with speed is becoming important.
The first signs of a different approach towards building the AI and services proposition for consumers and businesses, seem to be the new “stack” framework. “The stack is only useful if it is able to bend the curve on the outcomes that we all care about,” he said.
As Nadella painted a picture of a new framework, he referenced the early days of computers being used in workplaces and at homes, which he calls the PC era, and said that was the “last time the real frontier of organisational work really changed as we could see productivity gains because we started using digital tools to do information work, what we describe as knowledge work, in every business process”.
He made a pitch for the company’s Microsoft 365 suite, and said that the ability to build copilots for different workflows and domains is a “revolution where everybody’s using it all the time to change their organisational frontier.”
Central to this story was the concept of the Agent, or as the company terms it, a Copilot. Nadella described a shift away from simple chat interfaces—where a human prompts a bot and gets a text response—toward “agentic workflows.” In this near-future vision, he believes AI acts less like a search engine and more like a colleague.
Microsoft Copilot, the company says, finds relevance for consumers, as well as domains including science and health, information work, coding as well as web security solutions. The Microsoft 365 subscription, which includes apps and services including Word, Excel, SharePoint and OneDrive cloud, Teams and Outlook to name a few, all have AI and agents integrated in different forms. Nadella noted the new Researcher, Analyst and Agent Mode options, as well as what he calls the “IQ Layer”.
The challenges of every previous era of technology was that we created many systems, and each of these systems had a data system associated. Unfortunately, the hard impact of that was we had many data silences. So one of the 4 goals for us, because we have these very powerful systems of intelligence, is to somehow have it grounded in the context of your data. A lot of hard work has to happen,” he said. Nadella then made a pitch to Microsoft 365 enterprise customers with a proposition that their systems will be able to recognise relationships between people, including projects, emails and files as well as communications.
He also noted that Microsoft Foundry, the company’s interoperable AI platform that allows developers to build quickly and for organisations to maintain a level of control, now offers a choice of more than 11,000 open-source and frontier AI models to work with. Foundry includes the App Builder, Copilot Studio and GitHub, a platform to store, manage and share code.
He cited several Indian organisations already using these tools, including Apollo Hospitals for clinical intelligence, ONGC for improving operational efficiency, and Tech Mahindra. Rare as it is for keynotes by tech leaders, Nadella projected his own computing device to demonstrate some deep research agents he was working on, including a decision orchestrator.
To demonstrate the capabilities of this new decision-making framework, Nadella leaned into his roots with a smile, tasked the AI with a quintessentially Indian challenge — selecting the best Indian cricket test team. Cricket fans would know, this is no simple query. The demonstration showed the use of a “Decision Orchestrator” (DXO) to weigh conflicting factors —recency bias, error rates, and historical data. He described a “boardroom in a box” scenario where different AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, acted as committee members, debating choices and checking each other’s work to eliminate bias. And in the case of AI, hallucinations. The results are expected to mirror human cognitive processes, but at faster speed.
For organisations in India, Nadella and Microsoft are pitching the sovereignty aspect too. He stressed the importance of giving organisations control over their data, offering a spectrum of options from Public Cloud to Private Cloud and Sovereign Cloud, ensuring data governance and regulatory compliance. He emphasised “sovereignty”—ensuring that as India builds its AI capabilities, the data and the intelligence remain governed by Indian regulations and values.
Microsoft is expanding its footprint in India, treating Azure as “the world’s computer.” Nadella also projected that by 2027, India will have the largest developer community on GitHub in the world, overtaking the US.
