On his first visit to India, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman took everyone by surprise when he introduced an AI companion for everyone.
At the Building AI Companions for India event held in Bengaluru, he urged Indian enterprises to embrace the Copilot wave and said, “Now is the right time to create these new models… All of the resources are now widely available. The APIs are brilliant. There are open source models happening everywhere.”
Case in point: Reflecting on DeepMind’s inception in 2010, Suleyman said: “Timing is everything… It’s critical that you get the timing right.”
He added that if he and his co-founder Demis Hassabis had launched DeepMind either a few years earlier or later, they might have missed the pivotal wave of deep learning advancements, potentially altering their success.
According to Suleyman, AI is constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated. “For too long, software has principally been utilitarian. My personal vision for AI has always been about how it can be a companion that can make each and every one of us feel more supported and smarter and more capable,” he said.
India Praised: Suleyman said that India was one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing markets and has one of its strongest R&D teams globally.
“We have extremely talented engineers and developers, and increasingly, we are involving social scientists, psychologists, therapists, scriptwriters, comedians, and other creatives,” said Suleyman, adding that this diversity allows the country to synthesise more perspectives and get a broader picture of people involved in the design and creation process.
“AI is going to put knowledge at everyone’s fingertips, synthesised, distilled, personally tuned to the way that you want to learn and use information,” he said, highlighting AI’s potential to democratise knowledge, making it accessible across work environments and enabling informed decision making.
S Krishnan, secretary of the Indian government’s Electronics and Information Technology Ministry, also touched upon the importance of voice and linguistic inclusivity, and how it could drive AI adoption in the country. “We try to do conversation in 22 different Indian languages… Voice really is the ultimate way to make these tools accessible,” he recalled, in a fireside chat with Suleyman.
Balance is Key: Suleyman urged for a balanced approach to AI, advocating for careful scrutiny without losing sight of its significant benefits.
“It’s healthy to ask difficult questions about the labour market or about privacy and security,” said Suleyman, stressing that it is also our collective responsibility—as we really care about civilisation.
However, he said that it is important to avoid overreacting prospectively and miss out on the obvious benefit of the system that delivers productivity, education, wealth, well-being, healthcare, as well as access to legal and medical advice.
