He was talking to Infosys cofounder and chairman Nandan Nilekani in Bengaluru, on the sidelines of an event where the company, the world’s third biggest by market value, announced fresh local investments.
“It is true even today, when you think about the scaling laws empowering AI, and pretraining in particular, it is Moore’s Law at work again,” Nadella said. Nilekani joked that it could be termed as “Nadella’s law,” to which he replied that he just wants to ride the technology wave.
On questions on AI overtaking humans, Nadella said that it will be a “jugalbandi between AI and humans.”
For India’s businesses and 17 million developers, Nadella said that in the next 12 months, the focus will be on the tools that they can build with the models, which will help create a “rich tapestry of agents”.
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Nilekani said that India will be the use case capital of the world. And Nadella outlined the impact being created by some of India’s leading startups and enterprises building out the use cases using AI.Nadella spent the morning interacting with key customers such as ICICI Lombard, Bank of Baroda and Clear and select CEOs such as Salil Parekh of Infosys and InMobi’s Naveen Tiwari. He sharing notes with them on the key products being developed using Microsoft and OpenAI tools. For instance, online travel platform MakeMyTrip, which has had over 77 million users, deploys a generative AI-powered conversational chatbot Myra to engage with customer queries and assist across all stages of travel planning and booking.
Others are widening the web of inclusion. Fintech startup Cleartax created a Gen AI Whatsapp bot to simplify tax filing for India’s 20 million gig workers, innovating with agentic AI to reduce the number of tokens required per conversation. Within the first month of launch, over 200,000 gig workers filed their taxes, including 150,000 first-time filers, facilitating tax refunds worth $3.5 million.
A use case like this can apply to anybody, not just gig workers, Nadella remarked adding that maybe he will use it to file his taxes too since the process is very complicated.
Boosting productivity
Meanwhile, IT services company Cognizant using Microsoft’s Copilot has reduced the time employees spend on emails by 10%, alongside a 27% increase in employees leaving meetings early and a 73% boost in document creation, which they say enables people to focus on high-value tasks and deliver more value to clients. The company has also developed over 50 use cases tailored for different apps to drive productivity improvements.
“Essentially, all of that is aggregating to better knowledge creation and diffusion inside of Cognizant,” Nadella said. “Document creation is not our goal, but to be able to synthesise better is one of the things that will be great as we even evangelise.”
Similarly, Persistent Systems developed Contract Assist, an AI-driven solution to streamline internal contract management negotiations. This solution has reduced emails during negotiations by 95%, and cuts navigation or negotiation time by 70%, according to the company– a task that currently takes approximately 20-25 minutes.
Financial services players, early adopters of digital technologies, are also taking the next step with AI adoption.
Insurance provider ICICI Lombard leverages the technology in health claims processing where an AI copilot helps adjudicators not just summarise 40-80 page documents but compare them to standard protocols, cutting down the 20 minute time adjudicators spend on average by about 50% and improving consistency.
State-owned Bank of Baroda’s AI-driven virtual relationship manager is helping 16,000 customers understand its products and onboard, while its 75,000 staff use a bot called “GyanSahay.AI” for better knowledge management and customer service delivery.
Around 30,594 AI projects are being developed from India, Nadella noted, highlighting that India is set to surpass the US as the largest developer ecosystem by 2028.
