For every $1 investment on GenAI, there's 5x ROI in India—higher than the global average: Microsoft's Nicole Dezen

The Chief Partner Officer and CVP of Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft, during a recent visit to India spoke exclusively to Forbes India about India's partner system, GenAI-led growth and more

By Naini Thaker Forbes India Staff

Published: Mar 28, 2025 01:42:54 PM IST

Updated: Mar 28, 2025 04:22:37 PM IST

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Nicole Dezen, chief partner officer and CVP of Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft

Software company MandelBulb has been automating fiber quality inspections for manufacturing giant Grasim Industries by leveraging Microsoft’s Azure AI services and Microsoft Fabric, its data analytics platform. The use of these has helped them reduce processing time from 4 hours to 1 minute besides achieving a 98 percent defect-detection accuracy.

“Our partnership with Microsoft enables us to bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and real-world business impact. By harnessing Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric, we’re not only transforming processes like manufacturing defect detection and data reconciliation but also redefining what’s possible for our clients,” says Deepanshu Thakur, co-founder, MandelBulb.

MandelBulb is one of Microsoft’s many partners globally that Nicole Dezen, chief partner officer and CVP of Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft, mentions in an exclusive conversation with Forbes India to underline the value they bring to partners. According to a recent International Data Corporation survey, she says, for every $1 of Microsoft revenue, services partners earn $8.45, and software partners earn $10.93. “This underscores the immense opportunity available to partners of all types.”

The tech giant has one of the largest partner ecosystems in the industry, numbering 500,000 and growing. In India alone, Microsoft has a 20,000+ partner network across 850 Indian cities to drive AI and cloud adoption across industries. They are working with customers like Apollo Hospitals, Bajaj Finance, RailTel and upGrad among others.

Dezen adds that generative AI is forecast to grow exponentially faster than the overall IT market and partners generating at least 25 percent of their Microsoft-related revenue from AI can expect higher margins and revenue growth, unlocking even more potential for transformation and success. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Q. How is Microsoft leveraging its partner ecosystem and investments in India to drive innovation, and address business challenges with AI?

Microsoft has been a partner-led company for close to 50 years—it’s in our DNA and our heritage. How we deliver customer success is incredibly important to our core mission and how we operate as a company. We have partners spanning across all of our six commercial solution areas, which covers every industry, customer segment and geography.

Coming to India, there’s so much positive energy about the capabilities that Microsoft is delivering through our platform. It is incredible excitement that we see around the possibilities that AI creates to solve business challenges, and the innovation and creativity that we see here—amongst our partners. Microsoft is investing significantly in this market, to enable more partners to participate in this innovation journey—an investment of $3billion for cloud and AI over the next two years, and our commitment to skill 10 million people on AI by 2030.

Q. What kind of AI-led investments is Microsoft making, particularly in India?

For every $1 investment on GenAI, there's 5x ROI in India—higher than the global average of 3.7x—indicating that the returns are higher than global trends. Indian companies are seeing value of implementing AI technologies in about 14 months—close to the global average of 13 months.

Microsoft has also joined hands with SaaSBoomi to propel India’s AI and SaaS ecosystem towards a trillion-dollar economy. Over the next five years, Microsoft and SaaSBoomi aim to impact over 5,000 startups and over 10,000 entrepreneurs, upskill more than 150,000 startup employees through focused workshops, foster regional development in 20+ tier II cities and create over 200,000 new job opportunities.

Also read: Shaping India's future with AI skills and jobs

Q. How crucial is skilling, especially within the partner ecosystem?

Skilling is one of our most in-demand solutions, and we provide support to enable our partners effectively. This is especially a priority for SMEs and MSMEs in India. In a world where the pace of innovation is changing so rapidly, one of the best things we can do for our partner ecosystem is to continue to give them access to skilling and we do that in-person and online. Partners are often the face of Microsoft to a customer, and so it's incredibly important that we treat them as an extension of our sales force.

Q. SMBs are critical to India’s economy. In your view, what are the specific AI capabilities or tools Microsoft partners are using to help SMBs scale, innovate, and compete effectively in the global market?

One of the things we look at is what are the unique needs of any customer segment. I believe small and medium enterprises can have tremendous gains through the technology of AI. For instance, companies that don't have their own IT departments still have the same business challenges. They still have employees, and they want to enrich their employee experience. They want to be able to enhance customer capability.

So because they want to optimise business processes, AI is a huge unlock to be able to do that. We look to our partner ecosystem to be able to educate these customers on what is possible to understand the customers’ needs and then to bring Microsoft's AI tools, skills, solutions and services to them, mapped against our partners, solutions and services. So, the way we go to market is Microsoft delivers platform capability and then our partners deliver their own IP services and solutions on top.

Also read: Will India have its own AI model?

Q. What is the competitive edge Microsoft brings to customers? And what is your strategy to further deepen this partnership?

For us recruiting and retaining partners is fundamental—because only when our partners succeed, we succeed. Together with our partners, we’ve harnessed technology as a force for good, transforming industries and communities. From our early days of revolutionising personal computing to leading the way in cloud innovation and now AI, our shared milestones highlight the power of collaboration and reinvention.

In recruiting new partners, we talk to them about all of the business capability and the investments we make in ensuring their business’s success. There's a recent IDC survey that showed that for every $1 of Microsoft revenue our services partners earn $8.45, and our IP partners earn $10.93. This is one of the many ways in which we measure the value that we put into the partner ecosystem.

It's critically important that our partners build healthy, thriving businesses to contribute to local economies and communities, to be great employers. One of the ways we continue to retain and develop our partners is by the investments we make in the Microsoft AI cloud partner program. This is an umbrella program for everything a partner needs to be successful with Microsoft—everything from onboarding as a partner, to helping them demonstrate to a customer their competency in a technical solution area. The goal is that we want to help them build strong adjacent businesses and take full advantage of everything the Microsoft platform has to offer.