After Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s India visit last month, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, also decided that it was high time for Microsoft AI to make its mark on the country’s larger audience. Suleyman showcased Copilot’s prowess.
Speaking of AI companions, Suleyman, before visiting India for the first time, asked Copilot about the weather and GDP of Bengaluru and was quite surprised by it.
At the Building AI Companions for India event, besides hosting a Cafe Copilot featuring an entire food menu designed byCopilot, and RaagaTrippin’ using Copilot as its band member to generate lyrics on stage, Suleyman and the Microsoft team demonstrated why it is important for India to build its own AI models in the era of agentic AI while also finding the right use cases.
Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, highlighted how Microsoft is helping Indian companies build AI products. “Around 18,000 developers at Infosys have written seven million lines of code using GitHub Copilot,” said Chandok, while adding that Cognizant is a massive user of Copilot.
Notably, HCLTech’s AI Force platform and Genpact’s AI Guru have been infusing Microsoft AI into their services, streamlining software and code development while also teaching people about AI.
This is when Chandok invited Suleyman on stage to talk more about the upcoming Copilot products that are going to change how Indians communicate with AI companions.
Building AI in India is Crucial
Suleyman referred to Microsoft’s AI teams in India, especially those in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, as the strength of the company. According to him, these are where talented engineers and developers work on every layer of the company’s tech stack.
“AI is going to put knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, synthesised, distilled and personally tuned to the way you want to learn and use information,” he said, highlighting AI’s potential to democratise knowledge, making it accessible across work environments and enabling informed decision-making.
In a fireside chat with S Krishnan, secretary of the Indian government’s MeitY, Suleyman discussed Microsoft’s collaborative efforts with specialists from diverse fields to build AI systems that resonate with human values. Talking about the IndiaAI Mission and Bhashini, Krishnan said that, originally, they had envisioned building an LLM on their own. “Now that we are actually having a meeting, it may not be worth the effort of building an entire LLM on our own,” he added.
It might be better to adapt AI systems to be practical in the Indian context and useful for specific sectors in areas that India seeks to adapt based on ground reality. This resonates with the idea of Adbhut India, or AI use case capital of the world.
“We try to converse in 22 different Indian languages… Voice really is the ultimate way to make these tools accessible,” Krishnan pointed out.
Suleyman’s response to this was slightly different from what was expected. Reflecting on DeepMind’s inception in 2010, Suleyman said, “Timing is everything… It’s critical that you get the timing right.” He said that India was one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing markets and has one of its strongest R&D teams globally.
“I really feel that now is the right time to create these new models. All of the resources are now widely available. The APIs are brilliant. There are open-source models surfacing everywhere. And so it just feels like a very creative moment. And I’m excited to see so many startups and new businesses really experiment with this stuff,” Suleyman further said.
From Pessimist to Optimist
During the event, Suleyman also showcased the redesigned Microsoft Copilot, which now includes a conversational human-like voice, screen-viewing capabilities, and advanced reasoning functions. These innovations aim to transform daily user interactions with technology.
He described the recent strides in AI as “the first step towards distilling intelligence into algorithmic constructs”.
After co-founding GenAI startup Inflection in 2022, Suleyman and co-founder Karén Simonyan joined Microsoft in March 2024 following the acquisition of key Inflection AI team members. Surprisingly, he has always taken a critical approach towards AI, highlighting the dangers of the technology.
But, lately, it has changed. “For too long, software has principally been utilitarian. My personal vision for AI has always been about how it can be a companion that can make each and every one of us feel more supported and smarter and more capable,” he said.
Addressing the fear of job losses and regulations around AI globally, Suleyman explained that it’s super important to be as attentive and thorough about observing the potential upside as it is to really meditate on and deeply think about the potential downsides.
“It won’t just be able to talk to you. It’s going to be able to use APIs. It is going to be able to search through databases. It will generate new programs from scratch. It is going to be able to get things done in the digital world on a large scale. That’s actually what is coming in the next few years, more than anything else,” he said.
Suleyman said it’s time to be thoughtful and deliberate and not treat AI regulation as a taboo. He believes that nations need to start having an important dialogue around this.
Giving examples of drones, he said that regulations are effective. “We don’t have drones flying around randomly all over the world with autonomous capabilities. We were deliberate and proactive and careful, and I think that’s just the approach that we have to take,” he reiterated.
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