Mustafa Suleyman, who is the head of Microsoft’s AI division, emphasized the importance of the Indian market during his first ever visit to the country. He also mentioned that India, particularly Bengaluru and Hyderabad, is home to some of the most skillful teams working for Microsoft. Suleyman, who is not only the co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI visited the city to explain and convince on the importance of AI – how it can benefit people’s lives as well as economies of countries.
Apart from praise for class engineering and development resources in India, during the event in Bengaluru titled Microsoft: Building AI Companions for India, Suleyman also expressed the need for appreciation of multi-ethnic, gender and religious diversity in development of AI. He underscored that, given the number of non-technical disciplines being brought in Microsoft is escalating. As Suleyman mentioned, this plurality enables the creation of AI that understands people and their cultures better.
During a fireside chat, S Krishnan, the Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Suleyman engaged in a discussion explaining the economic possibilities of artificial intelligence, in particular with regard to developing economies. He compared its effects to that of the internet which democratized access to information. “AI is now going to put knowledge at everyone’s fingertips,” he asserted. It will be in this way, that people will use AI not to simply access information but devise ways of using the information that will best work for them within their specific framework and goals of understanding information.
Suleyman claims that Microsoft 365 Copilot is an enhancement of productivity features that introduces AI in the work environment. These AI enabled assistants installed in Microsoft Word, Excel and Teams provides users with assistance that is related to the contents of the organization thus helping them to work effectively towards their objectives. Suleyman added that such systems are already enabling knowledge workers generate better ideas because of AI tools enhancing their decision-making processes and enhancing their productivity.
Turning back to aspect of artificial intelligence in India, Suleyman pressed the need to intensify the investments for linguistic and translation-oriented technologies in order to avail the tools to more users. Open Data Access was another rollout that he pitched owing to its potential for stimulating startups and businesses to use their AIs more effectively using government wares assistance.
As an agent for more general concerns regarding AI, Suleyman accepted that the issue of ensuring confidentiality and data security communicates the need for regulation in a preventive manner. Also, he expressed the aspiration that it shall be possible to take policies on such an aspect of AI as self-enhancement but only in the distant future, when other risks relating to this technology will be controlled without state oversight.
S Krishnan in his remarks contemplated on the Indian AI Strategy, reiterating the focus of the Government on localizing and Indigenizing the AI. It was observed that India may take a different turn in the development of AI models and suggested that instead of developing AI from the scratch, existing models could be modified to suit the different sectoral needs. He also noted Bhashini, a government-sponsored AI translation application which is intended to help convert India’s multiple languages almost instantaneously.
