At a time when generative AI has emerged as a top priority for chief information officers (CIOs), Microsoft is seeing widespread adoption for its products from enterprises and social impact initiatives in India following the tech giant’s global push to infuse AI into all of its offerings. Hyderabad-based Microsoft India Development Centre (IDC), one of Microsoft’s largest R&D centres outside the Redmond headquarters, has been involved big time in research, development, infrastructure management, policy and skill-building initiatives around GenAI.
The facility has contributed to creating several of Microsoft’s most exciting offerings, like Azure, Windows, Office, and Bing. Copilot, a chat interface transforming natural language queries in any language, powered by a reasoning engine, is one of the widely adopted Gen AI applications in the country.
“IDC plays a key role in advancing our work with Copilot,” says Rajiv Kumar, MD, Microsoft IDC and corporate vice president, Experiences + Devices India. “Copilot’s capabilities are boundless, from providing information on any topic to crafting personalised content like leave applications or poems.” Some of the immediate applications have the potential to scale greatly and have social impact in the country.
For instance, Jugalbandi, an open source chatbot built using GPT models via Azure OpenAI Service helps users, particularly in rural areas, to access public services in their local languages via Whatsapp, he adds. “Imagine a farmer in Haryana asking the Jugalbandi app in Hindi about government schemes. The app understands his dialect and retrieves relevant information, usually in English, relaying it back in his native language. We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale, especially in India,” says Kumar.
In addition, Karya, an Indian startup that spun out of Microsoft Research is creating ethical AI datasets verified with Azure OpenAI Service, to lift rural Indians from poverty. As per Kumar, large Indian enterprises have also started adopting GenAI technologies from Microsoft. Axis Bank has adopted Copilot for Microsoft 365 at enterprise scale and has realised a 30% increase in productivity in daily work.
Around 7,000-odd Infosys developers are using GitHub Copilot.
“Organisations in India are also reporting an average $3.86 return for every US dollar spent on AI projects, and more than 150 organisations are already innovating with Azure OpenAI Service across industries such as agriculture, aviation, e-commerce, and FMCG,” says Kumar. Air India, ITC, LTI Mindtree, Genpact, Cognizant and Myntra are some of the large organisations in India using Microsoft’s Gen AI offerings.
According to Kumar, the challenges to the technology are at three levels. The GenAI models are unpredictable due to their ability to reason and produce novel outputs. Next, the concerns around AI taking over the world from humans. Lastly, there is a need to handle the technology responsibly so that it’s unbiased, positive and non-discriminative in its interactions.
