Artificial Intelligence disruption: AI agents will revolutionise SaaS and productivity: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents will disrupt SaaS (software-as-a-service) models with a lot of backend business logics being automated by agents, said Microsoft chief Satya Nadella.“A lot of the business logic will move to a new tier, which then will be a multi-agent tier that needs to be orchestrated. It’s going to be an agent that will orchestrate across multiple SaaS applications,” he said in conversation with technology veteran Nandan Nilekani in Bengaluru on Tuesday.

“(It will be) kind of like humans are the swarm of agents. That, I think, is the next frontier, and that’s where a lot of the productivity will come from. But just like I can build a spreadsheet, I will build thousands, hundreds of agents that are working to help me streamline my own work,” he said.

Nadella further added that 2025 will be the year of abundance of large language models (LLMs) and their capabilities.

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“I don’t think we’re going to be sitting here next year, admiring either the Moore’s law or even the LLMs, it will be what we’re doing with all that abundance. If there’s going to be an abundant commodity, you don’t sit there and pray to the abundant commodity. You use it,” he said.

Nilekani further added that India is emerging as the use case capital of AI with the digital public infrastructure in place as well as the government which can balance responsible AI development and innovation.“India will be the use case capital of AI. I think we have a number of things working for us. One is, we have 15 years of experience in building population-scale digital infrastructure. So we know that game,” Nilekani said.

“We have a political leadership which is very tech savvy. I know you (Nadella) met with Prime Minister Modi yesterday, and they understand that we have to strike the right balance between AI innovation and safeguards. So in some parts of the world, they say safeguards first, without worrying about the innovation. But I think we know the right balance between responsible AI and innovation, and we have a population which has learned to accept technology,” said Nilekani, the chief architect of the digital India stack and cofounder Infosys.

He explained that AI is already at play in various digital services. Aadhaar authentication, for instance, uses AI detections for liveliness in biometrics. Banking systems are also using AI-based fraud detection techniques.

However, AI inference costs must come down for AI to cater to a billion-population scale, Nilekani said. “I think inference costs have to be super frugal, because you’ve got a billion people doing all kinds of queries or agenting stuff, it has to work at that scale.”