Technology will empower a billion Indians: Microsoft India President

On skills, it's estimated that more than half of Indian talent of all types will need reskilling in two years, says Anant Maheshwari

Microsoft has been in India for more than three decades and the country has been core in the company’s strategy. From a single centre in Hyderabad, it now has over 16,000 employees. Anant Maheshwari, Microsoft India President, spoke to Shivani Shinde about the cloud opportunity, the metaverse and the regulatory landscape. Edited excerpts…

How has tech adoption evolved here?

We believe tech will empower a billion Indians. While there's been a lot of downside in the last couple of years, one a positive aspect has been how digital has come to support every sector of the economy and every person - empowering them to do more. India is in the midst of that digital revolution and maybe even slightly ahead of the world curve. 

One major reason for that is, even before the pandemic, we were already enabled by these billion scale platforms. So Aadhaar and UPI were not invented during the pandemic, they were already at scale and running. We already had a large number of internet users. Now, it’s going above 800 million people. Smartphone users are around 700-800 million people.

Also, the start-up community and the core enterprises are taking digital as the biggest growth driver. I have met countless CEOs in the last four months and not one said this digital transformation is not core to me.

When it comes to cloud, we were amongst the first ones to pivot on India and make the investments. We opened three data centres more than seven years back and that was way ahead as no one was thinking of cloud in India. We have been continuously scaling these investments and are the number one public cloud player.

We partner with 30,000 companies who are using Microsoft solutions. The ecosystem that this generates, the number of developers we have, the people who are working on this, it's massive jobs and skills creation both in the company and the ecosystem.  

There is not one public cloud in the future. There is a financial services public cloud, a retail public cloud, a healthcare public cloud, because each will have specific capabilities.

Does Microsoft have a unique position in the cloud ecosystem?

One unique aspect about Microsoft is that we lead with a consumer play first and also do some business. But Microsoft has always been a B2B business. That’s a very distinct difference between us and all the other tech players. We are there to support the tech intensity of every company and build that tech intensity where every company has its own tech ID. We see ourselves as enablers, serving every company on the planet and the fact that we don't do B2C that much, makes every company feel very comfortable working with us. 

What are the opportunities for Microsoft when it comes to innovation? 

We believe in the NASSCOM report that nearly half a trillion dollars could get added to the Indian economy by the leverage of data and AI. 

To enable this, our role is to create those tech capabilities, skills and take India up on the innovation curve, which means leading with the quality and productivity of cutting edge innovation thinking that one can drive globally.

We are also creating centres of scale closer to the talent pools and in these centres, we empower teams to be part of our global engineering initiatives. Innovation at scale is happening today.  

Your take on the PDP Bill and the rising role of  the government...

I think having clarity on regulation on privacy, on the broader trust aspect, is critical. There are two trend lines that got accelerated during the pandemic: one is the use of data and AI and the second is trust and security.

Data and AI are a big part of our lives today and are accelerating in the enterprise space and every industry. When it comes to trust and security, people will use technology only when they trust it. This got accentuated during the pandemic as we brought our personal spaces and families into the view of our colleagues. But suddenly, information that was within the secured walls of an enterprise moved to an employee’s home environment, changing the security framework.

Trust and security will become even more important going forward.

Everybody is talking about the ‘great resignation’. What is Microsoft’s take on it and how significant is the skills mismatch in India?

I like to use the term the ‘great reshuffle’ rather than the great resignation, because people are not stopping work. It is reshuffling the talent pool and reshaping skills. The one theme that is resonating is the hybrid paradox. 74 per cent of Indian employees want flexible remote work options. And 73 per cent of employees crave more in-person office time because they want to work with teams. So simple math says that at least half of the people want both. This is the hybrid paradox everyone is working out.  

On skills, it’s estimated that more than half of Indian talent of all types will need reskilling in two years. If you combine the great reshuffle with the need for skill and the hybrid paradox, it takes us to a scenario of what kind of talent I need with what skill sets in what physical and hybrid locations and therefore, how should I play? No one has a clear answer to all these questions.

What is Microsoft’s take on metaverse?

These are the game capabilities that already exist. Microsoft launched the mesh capability in Teams a few months back, which essentially means that you will bring people, things, places in a very different way and together.

To me this is reality, maybe a meshed reality, but nevertheless a reality. I guess we are moving from the paradigm of intelligent edge, intelligent cloud to ambient intelligence, and omnipresent computing, so to me those two are very critical to define how it will be going forward, because everything that we touch has some level of computing inside it. And so, therefore, how you interact with that will become very different.