<\/p>\n
Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Satya Nadella is in India, promoting the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools – Copilot, agentic AI, and datasets – and urging the government and domestic businesses to adopt them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Microsoft’s big push follows rival Google’s recent $15-billion investment to set up a one-gigawatt (GW) data centre in India, signalling a rising competition among global tech giants to dominate the country’s fast-growing digital market.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Nadella spoke in India for a second time this year on Wednesday in front of senior government officials and top executives of big domestic enterprises. On the sidelines, he also met billionaire Gautam Adani, showcasing Microsoft\u2019s AI capabilities to the promoter of one of India\u2019s largest conglomerates. The company backed its pitch by committing $17.5 billion to build AI infrastructure in India and skill 20 million people over four years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cTo be successful in the AI<\/a> frontier, organizations need a mindset shift in order to deploy an AI system, which is really a learning system, from the ground-up\u2014instead of simply adding an automation layer. This requires a mindset shift, which means you need to reskill yourself in order to think about things differently. And, in order to reskill yourself, you need everyday tools for it. And then, ultimately you\u2019ll need the datasets that go with these tools\u2014and this will define success in the AI era,\u201d Nadella said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Both Microsoft and Google have assured that data used on their AI platforms will remain within India’s borders. This explains why both the companies are investing in their data centres in the country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nadella spent 32 minutes talking about Microsoft’s products, and even demonstrated its AI platforms. He also ran slides naming 109 Indian companies that he claimed were already customers of Microsoft\u2019s Copilot AI suite. Some of them include public-sector energy major Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Apollo Healthcare, Maruti Suzuki, Infosys and Tech Mahindra. At one point, Nadella even joked that he\u2019s the project manager of his demonstration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last week, Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India<\/a> and South Asia, told Mint that the Indian clients for its AI suite were no longer just pilots. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing clients start deploying AI at scale, and we\u2019re engaging with them by showcasing gains in efficiency and use cases,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Google, too, made similar claims. On 13 November, Matt Renner, president of global revenue at Google Cloud<\/a>, told Mint <\/i>in a roundtable that the company was showcasing its foundational AI capabilities to tap clients with long-term cloud-and-AI deals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe\u2019re seeing a very strong demand increase for Google Cloud, and that is seen through public data. We\u2019re seeing our overall growth rates increase over the last three quarters, and we\u2019re growing faster than before. That\u2019s not necessarily happening at the same pace as our competitors. This is because of AI, which has changed the conversations clients were having around hyperscalers\u2014which were around what skills they had around Amazon and Microsoft. Today, Google can do what its competitors can do, but they can\u2019t do everything that we can,\u201d Renner said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The brewing AI battle harks back to the previous eras when top tech firms clashed to capture India\u2019s enterprise market, said Kashyap Kompella, a veteran AI analyst.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTypically, India has always been a provider of tech services, and not a major generator of revenue. This is slowly beginning to change, as enterprises across the country give birth to a market that could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for AI services<\/a> each year. With China being a closed market and adoption in Europe and North America both slow, India could well be the next frontier for Big Tech to double down upon,\u201d Kompella said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n