We want to be a co-pilot in India's AI journey: Microsoft's Irina Ghose

She talks about how AI is getting infused in security and Microsoft's focus in the new year

Last year, Microsoft launched the Secure Future Initiative (SFI), an effort to advance cybersecurity protection. Irina Ghose, managing director, Microsoft India and South Asia talks about the initiative and how Indian enterprises are looking at cybersecurity. October is also the month of cybersecurity awareness. She tells Shivani Shinde over a video call, how AI is getting infused in security and Microsoft’s focus in the new year. Edited excerpts…

 

Microsoft launched SFI last year, how has it progressed in India?

 

In the age of AI, the cybersecurity landscape has been changing rapidly. While the AI’s transformative power is reshaping a new generation of tools, tactics, new opportunities, at the same time threats are also increasing at an accelerating pace. Three years back the number of signals we were looking and monitoring were about 8 trillion, that has now reached 78 trillion, which was 65 trillion last year. This is how exponential steep this curve has been.

 

Microsoft Secure Future initiative is designed for building technologies that are secure by design, secure by default and secure all operations. When we launched this last year, it was to protect ourselves and customers and industry, and also look at all the threats. This is the largest cyber security engineering effort in history. It’s a multi-year commitment that has an equivalent of 34,000 full-time engineers dedicated to it.

 

How are you using AI/GenAI in security and what has been the impact on operations?

 

In 2023, we unveiled the AI potential into our first party products. It is an evolving solution which helps companies to better position themselves against any attack. In April this year, we took another step in helping defenders work faster, and better with the general availability of Copilot for security.

 

One of the impacts of including the Copilot in security, especially with novice defenders, was that they achieve 35 per cent more accurate responses and 26 per cent faster across all tasks. The other parameters we tracked among security professionals who have worked with a Copilot security is that they want to use it again.

 

For instance, Security Copilot for LTIMindtree reduced the average analyst training time, it helped them improve security operations centre capacity, and also brought in a better posture and strengthened the overall security expertise.

 

How is Microsoft seeing the GenAI use cases in India?

 

The country’s complexity and the multi-lingual setting literally makes it a big test bed and an ideal test scenario where many of our innovations are being put across for pilots first and then we are deploying it in the rest of the world. A lot of these things are being done by frugal innovations, led by the entire industry, academia and enterprise. To give an instance, we built a cataract bot in collaboration with Shankara Eye Hospital, where millions of cataract operations happen every year. However, the after care of these patients is one where every patient struggles and every doctor would want to do it but cannot do it. We built a chat bot powered by GPT4 as a human in the loop expert chatbot, which was deployed in which patients after the surgery can ask questions in any language of their choice and the doctor is also able to see the questions and put a very timely response. There are several such instances in agriculture, education etc.

 

Across the enterprises we have done more than 150 boardroom meetings to create new use cases and go across enterprises to meet their most challenging needs. We are going across sector by sector to ensure that we create things which are meeting requirements for the last mile. This year, for us, is going to be about taking AI at scale, and ensuring that RoI happens.

 

What will be three big focuses for Microsoft in India as we get into 2025?

 

Number one, will be ensuring that we lead in the AI space with security and building AI into everything we are doing. Second is skilling. To ensure that the entire ecosystem stays ahead of the curve. And skilling needs to be something that people refresh every three months. Third, India is on a journey where we are building across population scale digital public infrastructure. We would clearly want to be a co-pilot in India’s AI journey.

 

After the Crowdstrike incident, there have been cases where companies are talking of moving away from cloud and getting back to on-prem IT systems. What’s your take?

 

The incident underscored the need for mission critical resiliency, that every organisation builds and how we as a platform partners or any of the hyperscalers have built in the ability to support any kind of a change, and that is what is required and what we did. The incident demonstrates the interconnected nature of the broad ecosystem. I do not think that there is any level of scepticism getting built in on how the journey has to be going forward when it comes to cloud. There are two reasons, first the advantages of what cloud gives, and two the enhancement that AI brings on the cloud infra is unparalleled.