India is number two only next to the United States in terms of total number of developers on GitHub and it’s going to become number one in 2027 or 2028, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft said on Thursday.
Speaking at Microsoft AI Tour, he said that Microsoft will expand its Code Without Barriers program to India this month, to democratise access to tech skills nationwide. The program was launched in 2021 across nine Asia Pacific (APAC) countries to help close the gender gap in the region’s fast-growing cloud, AI, and digital technology sectors. Through Code Without Barriers, Microsoft will provide skilling and certification to 75,000 women developers in India in 2024.
Nadella also announced Microsoft’s new skilling investment in India to empower people and organisations to thrive in the AI era. The investment will see Microsoft provide two million people in India with AI skilling opportunities by 2025.
It also announced that Indian generative AI startup Sarvam AI is working with it to make its Indic voice large language model (LLM) available on Azure. Sarvam AI is building generative AI models targeting Indic languages and contexts. The startup aims to make the development and deployment of generative AI apps in India more accurate and cost effective.
In January, Microsoft enabled 100,000 developers to advance their careers in AI through its AI Odyssey initiative. The initiative allowed participants to take the first step towards becoming a subject matter expert in AI by learning new skills and earning Microsoft credentials. Microsoft is expanding the AI Odyssey program to other Asian countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, China, Vietnam, and Thailand, after receiving an overwhelming response from India.
Sarvam AI’s Indic voice LLM, which intends to provide a natural voice-based interface to LLMs, will initially be available in Hindi. Sarvam AI is working to expand coverage to more Indian languages while ensuring support for colloquial language use. By working to make Sarvam AI’s Indic voice LLM available on Azure, Microsoft is laying the foundations for more India-focused developers to build real-time, voice-based generative AI apps at scale, the company said in a statement.
Nadella said that Shiksha Copilot, developed by Microsoft Research India, harnessed the power of generative AI to revolutionise the teaching landscape, providing educators with tools to personalise learning experiences and thereby improving learning effectiveness and saving valuable time.
The project, implemented in collaboration with the Sikshana Foundation, an NGO dedicated to enhancing the quality of public education, has been initially deployed at several public schools in Karnataka.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, Persistent Systems also launched an innovative Generative AI-powered Population Health Management (PHM) Solution in collaboration with Microsoft. The solution helps patients receive quality care at the right time and in the right place, while optimising capacity and cost effectiveness for healthcare providers and organisations.
