India-built public goods infra globally applicable: Satya Nadella

Microsoft chief praises country's digital public good infrastructure as 'great, important'

Public good infrastructure powered by Indian technologies is applicable globally as well, said Satya Nadella, Microsoft chairman and CEO on Thursday.

“It has 100 per cent global applicability. The PM’s vision and all the programmes (yojanas) and the India stack have coevolved and created a virtuous cycle that is unlike anything else in the world. I think both these are the biggest contributions that India can make to the world. The idea that there is a digital public good infrastructure is great, but more importantly it is available for the common man to use,” said Nadella at Microsoft’s Future Ready Summit in Bengaluru.

Nadella was in conversation with Nadan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys and former chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)

Asked where India is in using technology to deliver public goods, Nilekani said: “I think we are half way on the journey. The big vision is to create a digital-first economy and society by leveraging the power of modern digital technologies, and to improve the lives of the people by bringing eco growth.”

“In 2016, we had 1,000 start-ups and today we have 90,000. Many of the digital public goods have actually enabled this entrepreneurial growth. Jio was able to scale up to 1 million customers a day because of eKYC. Zerodha became the largest broking company because of payments growth,” said Nilekani.

Nadella, who is on a four-day visit to India, visited Bengaluru to address developers and entrepreneurs. He said there are 100,000 Microsoft Cloud Skills and certified developers. Indian developers comprise the second largest base on GitHub, Microsoft’s cloud-based software platform.

Asked how his bet on Open AI has panned out, Nadella said: “It’s phenomenal to see what is happening at the foundational models. The fundamental thing is, we are seeing emergent scale effects. In technology it’s all about being able to bet on great teams with clear vision and the ability to back them to the hilt. That is what I saw,” said Nadella.

In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI to support them in building artificial general intelligence.