Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday met Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella in New Delhi and spoke about the ‘Digital India’ vision. The Hyderabad-born Microsoft chief applauded the Indian government’s focus on “sustainable and inclusive economic growth”.
Nadella also met External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and discussed several issues pertaining to governance and security in the digital domain.
The CEO is on a four-day visit to India, where he addressed industry leaders at the Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Besides talking about the need for digital transformation in every organisation and the potential benefits of Microsoft Cloud in fostering creativity, advancing the national economy, and accelerating the growth of Indian firms, Nadella underlined how Microsoft is working towards the overall betterment of society with responsible AI. He emphasised how Microsoft is innovating across the tech stack to support the country's ecosystem of developers, startups, and companies in every industry when describing his vision for India's digital journey.
In December 2022, Google and Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai also visited India for the “Google for India” event and called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Droupadi Murmu in Delhi and Telecom and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. He also commended the technology boosting in India and promised to support India’s G20 presidency to promote an open, and connected internet for all.
Why are the big tech chiefs visiting India?
The existing AI models are trained on the data collected from the West, resulting in bias. These bias outputs mostly include established societal bias based on race, gender, sex, nationality, and age. Two well-known instances are racial bias in healthcare and facial recognition. Because there isn’t sufficient data on brown people in the training data, these systems struggle to identify persons of colour.
While Microsoft is partnering with Apollo to develop a cardiac prognosis model that will be trained on data from South Asians, Google is also collaborating with the medical chain to use AI for examining X-rays for tuberculosis. Google has also introduced Project Vaani to make internet more language inclusive and has announced grants to IIT-Madras for setting up a centre for Responsible AI, among others. Microsoft also spoke widely about using the tech for good, like how the State Bank of India (SBI) uses Power Apps to make financial services more accessible to those with special needs. Air India is using Microsoft 365 to increase productivity.
The big techs are coming to India to garner people’s support in collecting data for AI models to remove bias.
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