Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft that has toppled Apple as the most valuable company, believes that India with its robust developer community will be able to compete with any developed country in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) in enterprises. In an interview during his visit to India last week, Nadella, who has completed 10 years as the company's CEO, underscored the importance of keeping "humans in the loop" in Al-enabled projects, the value of India-specific large language models (LLMs), the need to regulate AI, and the need to create new value from technology to stay ahead. Edited excerpts:
How do you see India's developer community furthering the cause of AI in the country, and helping Microsoft achieve its goals here?
The fact that India (with 13.2 million) is now second only to the US (about 20 million) in terms of the number of developers on GitHub and expected to cross the US in 2027, is (a) tremendous (feat). The other thing that's super exciting for me on this trip is to see the broad adoption of GitHub Copilot (Microsoft-owned cloud-based AI developer tool) and how it's being used not just to build tools, but also to make the tools democratic by getting lots of people to use it.
This is just a taste of what India is capable of. This didn't happen with the (other tech shifts such as) PCs (personal computers), client servers, the web internet, or even mobile cloud where India was a big user of everything. Now, India is a developer of all this, and that is the big transformation. My dream has always been for India, and ERVIEW every emerging market, to be on par with any developed country when it comes to exploiting the benefits of new technology. Economic growth is not about just consuming tech, but also about creating tech-and that is the opportunity.
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