Technology: In the AI era, Microsoft to skill 20 lakh Indians by 2025
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Microsoft Corporation will skill two million Indians by 2025, its CEO Satya Nadella announced on Wednesday.
Speaking at “Microsoft CEO Connection,” a thought leadership event held in Mumbai for the top leadership of the Indian technology sector, he emphasized that the current era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be as transformative in its productive potential as the introduction of personal computers (PCs) was for enterprises across all industry verticals since the 1990s.
Urging Indian companies to adopt AI products quickly, Nadella said it had great potential to enhance productivity and revolutionize various industries, including science.
Praising the country of his birth for its recent advances, the India-born CEO of the global technology giant said the US and India should cooperate in AI regulation. AI, he said, is a powerful technology tool that should be “diffused” worldwide quickly for equal economic growth.
“I think it is imperative especially for India and the United States to be able to cooperate – what are the norms, what are the regulations even, instead of fracturing them,” said Nadella.
“India is one of the highest growth markets and you see it in buoyancy. The government and all of you have high ambitions of what’s going to happen even by 2025. And what percentage of that GDP will come from AI will be worth tracking for us,” he said.
India’s GDP is expected to hit the USD 5 trillion mark by 2025, of which USD 500 billion will be contributed by AI, he said, citing government data.
There were four big shifts in the modern technology world – personal computers, client servers, internet, and mobile and Cloud – but in AI adoption there is hardly a gap between India and the world.
“This is the first time I feel, what is happening in India and the rest of the world there is no impedance, gap…if anything, the use cases in India that are talked about are so unique that they are paving their own path. What’s exciting is that we are not just talking AI but also scaling it up,” said Nadella in a hall packed with top chief executives of technology firms.
“The early founders of AI dreamed that they create computers that understand us versus us trying to understand computers. I feel that we have kind of arrived at that with natural language. But multi-model video images, text and the ability to have arbitrary length conversations which are multi-domain.”
