Mumbai: As India embarks on its Artificial Intelligence (AI) journey, Microsoft will help the country become self-reliant by fostering a skilled AI workforce and empowering every sector and industry to transform with AI, the company’s Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, said in February.

During an address Nadella announced that Microsoft will provide 2 million people in India with AI skilling opportunities by 2025, to help close skills gaps and strengthen India’s ability to thrive in the AI era. “India is uniquely positioned to make the promise of AI a reality. We are committed to partnering broadly across the public and private sector to help close the nation’s AI skills gap and create new opportunities throughout the country,” Nadella told the gathering.

Nadella highlighted how Microsoft Copilot, along with the company’s other AI solutions, is driving measurable productivity gains for people and organizations by helping them complete work faster and with superior quality. Many organizations in India are already accelerating innovation using Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot, like Axis Bank, Infosys, HCL Tech, LTIMindtree and others.

Microsoft said that organizations in India are seeing an average $3.86 return for every US dollar spent on AI projects, and more than 150 organizations are already innovating with Azure OpenAI Service across industries such as agriculture, aviation, ecommerce, and fast-moving consumer goods.

Air India, the flag carrier airline, deployed a generative AI virtual agent called AI.g. It has successfully answered over half a million customer queries since its launch in March 2023, and manages over 6,000 queries a day in four languages. With its fourth data centre region set to go live soon, and data centres in collaboration with Jio, Microsoft boasts more datacenter regions than any other cloud provider in the country.