Satya Nadella speaks on AI, robots, US immigration: Key takeaways

Satya Nadella is on a three-day visit to pitch Microsoft's Azure cloud platform

In an interaction with Nandan Nilekani at an event in Bengaluru, Microsoft's India-born chief executive officer Satya Nadella on Monday praised Aadhaar  - the ambitious, biometrics-based citizen identification program. He also spoke about augmented reality, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, US President Donald Trump's immigration order and robots.

Nadella is on a three-day visit to pitch Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Here is what Satya Nadella has to say:

Nadella on Aadhaar: It's pretty tremendous how it got started" and the speed at which it was scaled. "It's very comparable to any other internet scale ramp-up.

Nadella on AI and robots: I think it is an exciting future but at the same time, you have to be very mindful of the impact of AI on jobs. That’s why I want to make sure some of the skilling work we are doing in India is going to help people. Nadella pointed out that Microsoft had been able to use AI to improve efficiency in government services in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh.

In a report published in The Financial Times, Nadella expressed hope to build superhuman combinations of AI and human. He said, "I think it is the coming together of liberal arts and sciences that are going to keep the human creativity and ingenuity [alive] in an age where machines are intelligent".

'India's tremendous entrepreneurial energy'
 

* India is probably one of the places in the world where the entrepreneurial energy is able to scale up, not just start

* The entrepreneurial energy in the country is "tremendous" and Microsoft is "enthused about it

* Every time I come back to India, the thing that grabs you is the entrepreneurial spirit of the place.

* There are a whole bunch of startups doing really exciting work

Nadella on Cortana: For me, I actually think of it as a third run-time, as an agent. When I say the third, the operating system of the device, whether it is the PC or the phone, the operating system was the first run-time. The second run-time you could say was the browser. The third run-time can actually be the agent, because, in some sense, the agent knows you, knows your work context, knows the work and that is how we are building Cortana. And give it really natural language understanding because, for all the advances in human-computer interface, there is nothing to beat language. And so, that is the ultimate breakthrough.

Nadella on Trump's immigration order: The Hyderabad-born CEO told The Economics Times that "an enlightened immigration policy" has enabled him to live the American dream. "American technology reaching me in India is what made it even possible to dream the dream. And then, the enlightened American immigration policy is what led me to live the dream. And I think those are things we will always advocate for... the American dream and the American enlightened immigration policy, especially for high-skilled workers, is something that I'm optimistic about," he said.