'There are areas where India will lead AI innovation': Christopher Young, Microsoft

During a recent visit to India and Bengaluru, Young sat down with Forbes India to talk about how Microsoft’s aim is to become a platform on top of which customers in every market can take up AI development and innovation.

In this conversation, recorded on November 21, he also spoke about how the company’s large team in India will play a role in this, as well as how India’s growing tech products ecosystem will be a source of world-first AI innovations, in areas such as healthcare. Edited excerpts.

Q. How is AI adoption among businesses changing, and anything noteworthy in India on that front? 

Globally AI adoption is happening in a few of different ways. Copilots such as the GitHub copilot are becoming very popular amongst developers in tens of thousands of organisations.

Similarly, the Microsoft 365 Copilot, which corresponds with all of our Microsoft 365 products, is seeing strong adoption. In India too, many of our partners such as the large IT services companies, for example, are using GitHub Copilot for their developers across the board. Companies such as Infosys and Wipro are also using Microsoft Copilot both internally and on behalf of our joint customers.

We're also starting to see specific vertical use cases emerge. For example, I met with a startup in Bengaluru that's focused specifically on enabling retailers to use AI in their marketing stack. For products businesses, AI is helping them reduce time taken, effort, expense and the complexity involved.

Customer support is another well-known area today in which AI is making a big difference. AI is helping (human) agents be better, faster at answering questions, doing follow-ups and so on. Microsoft has deployed AI in its own customer support, as you can imagine.

AI is also helping us write up cases after the fact, which helps us learn from the interactions. Overall, AI is really shrinking the amount of time people have to spend. It's improving their overall satisfaction. It's improving our ability to help our customers.

Q. In his keynote at your recent Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella spoke about AI doubling every six months. Explain this for us. 

What Satya is referring to in that case is really the capability of AI is changing quite rapidly. And it's enabling more and more use cases. If you rewind the clock back a year, one of the knocks on using generative AI was around mathematics. Like if you asked it to solve a problem, it actually might give you an approximated answer as opposed to an exact answer. It wouldn't actually calculate the answer for you. That's all changed now.

As you know we recently had a big election. I actually asked Copilot to calculate for me under different scenarios what would be the tax implications of some of the different policies that the incoming administration has talked about implementing. Today, AI is not only able to give me the answer, but to actually walk me through the calculations that it was doing as part of the answer. That’s an example of how it’s evolving.

I would say the tools are becoming more intuitive. We're getting much better at figuring out how to get the right answers out of our AI agents as well. This is another important thing. Not only are the tools themselves scaling and getting better, but so is our ability to use them, to provide the right context for these agents to be able to give us better answers.

And then there is this path of agentic AI—the ability for these AI agents and co-pilots to do work on our behalf. AI is evolving from just being able to give you good answers to being a companion that will actually perform a task on your behalf. We weren't there six months ago, but that's all happening in real time.

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Q. Are you finding that your customers are willing to bet important business decisions on these emerging AI capabilities? 

Every customer I have talked to, large, medium, small companies all around the world, everybody's going down the path of adopting more and more AI. Every CEO today has to have an AI strategy or the board will be dissatisfied.

Here in India, I was talking to the head of product at a medium-sized company (during my visit this time) and he said to me, “five or six months ago, I wasn't sure about Copilot, but today every time somebody asks me for more resources or solving a problem, my first question back is, are you using Copilot (yet)?”

In other words, technology heads are themselves asking if everyone in the organisation is bringing AI into their workflows. People are learning the capabilities, becoming more familiar. Only a year ago, and for a lot of this last year, we were telling people, just use it, just try it, and you'll start to see the power and potential.

So (today) I don't see much scepticism. It's more about what people are working through questions like how do I make sure I've got the right data policies in place, governance security models, responsible AI principles, programs, and processes. Today it’s not a question of if but when organisations will embrace AI. What they're thinking about is how do I do this well?

Q. Thus far, much of the investment, especially in this wave of AI over the last maybe five years, has been driven by very large tech companies such as Microsoft. Do you see large ‘non-tech’ businesses jumping in, like financial companies or even manufacturers? 

If you look at BlackRock’s commentary on their AI investments, which we spoke about at Ignite as well, it’s an example of how financial institutions have moved quite fast to implement AI. Many of them have been using versions of AI for a long time, in areas such as fraud modelling, for example.

Now, increasingly, they're starting to roll out AI tools to their teams, and they're starting to think about how they can roll out AI tools to their customer base. Enterprises such as manufacturers or retailers and financial services providers will be large consumers of the AI stack, whereas for the ‘hyperscalers’ the investments have to go into the whole ‘AI stack,’ everything from the data centres all the way to the Copilot, in Microsoft’s case.

We are also releasing tools, like AI Foundry, which will allow third parties to use different models and develop more use cases and solutions. All of these will be very useful across verticals, and that’s how we see the AI investments balancing out.

On the use cases side, I’m very optimistic about the idea and category of ‘AI for good and AI for all’. Here in India, I've just been blown away by some of the companies that I've met. For example, I met a company that's literally for $50 bringing high school education to students who didn’t have access to it. All you need is a mobile device.

And this conversation about AI for good would be incomplete without talking about healthcare. Last year, I spent a lot of time with a number of organisations in Southeast Asia. And one of the themes that came up time and time again was just for people who are trying to get diagnosed for certain types of cancers, because there weren't enough doctors in countries like Vietnam, for example, you couldn't even get your X-rays diagnosed.

With AI, they can work through the backlog much more quickly, and even identify cancers that were harder to spot with the human eye, and make a meaningful improvement in health outcomes for patients.

Q. In all these different areas, from autonomous vehicles to how we’ll get a cup of coffee in the future, what’s the role you see Microsoft playing? 

Our view would be that we will enable much of this innovation. Microsoft is a platform company, which means that we enable customers to build on that platform. There's so much promise and there's so much yet to be done. In some cases, we'll bring our own tools, like our own copilots.

The other aspect comprises all the foundational platform capabilities that will make innovation like autonomous driving or robotics possible. A robot serving coffee won’t be science fiction in the foreseeable future.

With all the investments in training AI, and developing tools, there's almost no aspect of our lives where I think it gets left out—in our personal lives too.

Q. What role do you envisage for your own large team in India and the growing tech products ecosystem here? 

India plays a huge role in the big picture. Number one, we have large numbers of team members and so all the product announcements that we made at Ignite, for example, would have ties back to teams that are in India. We have such a huge Microsoft population in India that we’ve team members working on a number of products, from consumer copilots to M365 Copilot to Azure, AI Foundry and all the foundational elements as well.

(Editor’s note: Microsoft generally doesn’t break out region-specific numbers, but reliable industry estimates put the company’s workforce in India at more than 22,000 employees.)

And then obviously we also look at India as a really important market, where there's tremendous amount of innovation going on. I've been really impressed by this notion of quick everything in India. There's quick commerce, but I'd broaden that and say there's quick everything.

It's not just being able to buy groceries or goods, but actually being able to buy services and have those services delivered. One example that blew me away the other day was you can get a blood test result in six hours. You can get your blood drawn (at home), six hours later you can have the results. We don't have anything like that in the US today.

India's really innovating in ways that we aren't even seeing in the Western world.

And then as Microsoft provides the AI platform, the large IT companies are going to enable a lot of these AI use cases, transform how they deliver services. India has a multifaceted role to play in AI, from being a market, to local innovation, to being home to our large team developing global products, to our partners bringing their services to global customers around our platform.

So India is an incredibly consequential country as it relates to realising the AI opportunity. And I will tell you, when I was here a year ago, I felt like there was still a bit more of a gap between what was going on in Silicon Valley around AI and what was happening in India. That gap has significantly narrowed.

Again, in healthcare, I expect that we will see AI innovation happen more quickly in India than it will happen in the US. Partly out of necessity. We may be learning from you on what's possible with AI in some of these healthcare use cases.