India can punch above its weight in AI, says Microsoft Asia president

All eyes are on India as the world’s biggest technology companies strengthen their position in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) by using the country’s engineering talent. A case in point is Microsoft, which just concluded its first AI Tour in India and got 3,000 attendees for the event. AHMED MAZHARI, president of Microsoft Asia, believes Indian information technology (IT) companies will lead global businesses in adopting AI. In a conversation with Shivani Shinde at the event in Mumbai, Mazhari spoke about Indian talent and AI’s growth. Edited excerpts:

In Asia, where is India for Microsoft when it comes to AI adoption?
 

I have (had) the opportunity to run a very interesting and eclectic set of geographies: From Japan, which is finally looking at the brink of growth; China, that has been a source for economic growth in the region except for last 24 months; India, South East Asia…I get the opportunity to see all these regions.
 

AI is touching everyone. I do not think there is a person who has a smartphone, who is not touching AI. On the enterprise side, we see different applications across the board. At the AI Tour in India we had four customers talking, and it was a difficult list to choose from… and we have customers in the government.
 

I’m very encouraged by the opportunity ahead in India. Our project FarmVibes, which is a massive platform for us in the US, is working in Baramati (in Maharashtra) on a farm of the future. It is a platform to help farmers drive better productivity on their land parcels. In our early experiments that we’re doing with Microsoft research, we're seeing the tonnes per acreage is up between 20 per cent and 30 per cent in certain products and markets.
 

I want to take the case of the IT services in India. IT services companies in India powered the economy for a decade and decade-and-a-half – that growth was on the back of an event-based situation, which is Y2K. They leveraged what was the client server transformation, and a lot of the transformation that they worked on has allowed India to become a huge engine for talent, capability and growth.
 

Similarly, these companies will be early adopters of the co-pilot, and AI. Because when customers turn around and say, we're sold on the idea of doing a proof-of-concept (PoC), then the next question is, whom to work with? The big IT services companies will be a major driver for enablement of AI at scale in the industry.
 

Comments from large IT players on AI are still about proof of concept. There are no large deals being signed. When do you see real adoption on scale happening?
 

I think we sometimes forget that it has been only a little over 12 months that AI was in the press, news, and before that only a handful of people spoke of it. There was one company that began to talk about it at scale, which was OpenAI. But Microsoft about nine months ago had already done the GitHub co-pilot launch, and by March of 2023, we were already doing early PoC.

In some ways we begin to miss the point that this technology is only 12 months in the hands of technologists. But the implementation in certain markets, industries are much bigger in scale than the others. If I look at digital retail, or social retail, it's actually embedded deep.
 

Our insights on our enterprise-wide supply chain, which is pretty complex, that we're now getting is because of our ability to track data from emails, team chats, Word documents, PowerPoint documents and ERPs is at a level which we have never perceived it to be at.
 

When I see customers and the sharpness with which they are finding RoI (return on investment) for this implementation…I cannot see a technology where the diffusion rate is as fast as AI. The Indian IT industry is getting ready for it. We have seen all the large IT firms’ CEOs talking about this.
 

Any instances where India leads some adoption?
 

Look at the adoption of GitHub …it is across the board. We announced results recently and GitHub’s growth rate was 40 per cent. For one of our IT clients in India, the developer productivity is in the mid-30s. The competitiveness of this industry will actually get quite accelerated.
 

We keep hearing from Microsoft and others that India is going to be important in terms of AI talent. How do you see this in comparison to other regions in Asia?
 

Take the case of GitHub, it’s the largest open source (code) developer platform of the world. India is poised to overtake the US in terms of developer engagement on that platform by 2027. Even today, one in four AI projects on GitHub are done in India. The question is are they consumed internationally or are they consumed in India? A lot of the stuff that gets built in India is getting consumed internationally.
 

This is evident in the type of companies being built now. India is building product companies, SaaS (software as a service) companies that are hitting Rs 2,000-3,000 crore in a short time. For instance, HCM (human capital management) platform DarwinBox or Builder.ai are international companies. They’re all on our platform. What we’re now enabling them to do is to help their innovation cycle using Microsoft Copilot.
 

I see India having multiple opportunities to punch at, or above its weight. Number one is the creation of SaaS companies where there is a big enough market in India that will help people get to minimum viable scale, and then they can sell in the US in Europe, or Southeast Asia. The second will be around talent. I can easily see AI Talent moving to the West or to the Western markets, not permanently. But actually to work on core critical projects and I see a more of a rotation happening there.
 

Third, IT services companies will create a massive revenue stream for AI enablement. An area of opportunity for the IT services companies is with data engineering…getting the fundamentals of an AI enabled ecosystem in place.
 

The early use cases of AI/GenAI has been efficiency improvement, what other areas do you see getting impacted by this?
 

Health care is a great example. 
 

I just met the founder in Vietnam of a company called VinBrain, which is doing deep research on cancer scans. What is fascinating is that they are using doctors for prompt engineering.
 

 In many ways in certain markets because of the fact that health care is not inclusive yet, there is a lot more support from the government to try and do more ambitious stuff around it. Myntra, which is a fashion portal, is doing their user experience and consumer management using GenAI. Indigo is using AI for bookings, and that is the revenue side and they are saying that AI is an opportunity in every bit of their operations in aviation.
 

AI has been around since 1956. The biggest shift that has happened now is that AI, which was maths and statistics creating insight, has now turned into cognition. In many instances you will see the cognition level of some of the outcomes are very human like.
 

How significant is Microsoft India development teams in this whole AI build up that Microsoft is talking about?

We have development centres across the world and India plays a big role in it as do other markets. We tap talent globally. A lot of our products are built, serviced and supported from India too.

How is Microsoft using AI for itself and its impact?

We have to be our own customer zero first. We have adopted AI over the last 12 months – what is known as Service Copilot. We are already at a stage where we're seeing substantial savings in our own cost space. We're using sales Copilot in the field teams. And the notion here is that we would like to be at a stage where our adoption of this technology will enable every industry, every frontline worker, customer service agent, manufacturing plant worker to have a support mechanism in a co-pilot where they can ask questions, training…and will create significant amount of inclusive growth in the future.

India has implemented the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP). How are Indian corporates looking at it?

I met the chairman of one of the largest banks in India. He said AI will help enable DPDP because then it creates more precision in the conversations and in the outcomes that are delivered and we will have a much better ability to go and audit and determine what happened.

The use of AI in cybersecurity is not at the desired levels. What is Microsoft’s experience in India?

The surface area for an attack every day continues to increase. And because the surface area continues to increase the vulnerability points in any organisation, enterprise continues to increase. We're working very closely, not only with commercial enterprises, but equally with governments. With government skills become an important area.

The CyberShikshaa platform is actually helping skill people on daily uses of technology and how to be cyber ready, this is for women too. I think where we need to play a bigger role is to become more inclusive in markets like India, where we feel that women may be left behind because there may not be enough training and education on how to use and how to prevent.