After $17.5 Billion Bet, Microsoft Says India Moving From AI Experiments to Real-World Impact

In an interview, Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, outlined his top predictions, saying that AI has moved beyond hype, delivering real impact today. “The next phase will be defined by how responsibly, inclusively, and thoughtfully we scale it,” Chandok told a Delhi-based news agency.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, during his visit to India earlier this month, announced plans to invest $17.5 billion here to help build infrastructure and sovereign capabilities for the country's AI-first future—the bold commitment marking the tech giant's largest investment ever in Asia.

Noting the AI future in India, Chandok said that the country’s digital public infrastructure enables mass AI adoption, turning national scale into a global advantage. “My predictions for the rearranging world and frontier AI include intelligence moving from being scarce to abundant, with compute increasingly translating directly into cognition for organisations, in an era of ‘unmetered intelligence,” he said.

Roles will break into tasks, careers will become more dynamic, Microsoft India honcho said describing skilling as the primary safeguard in the AI era. “When I reflect on the technology story of 2025, what stands out is how decisively India moved from experimenting with AI to putting it to work across core sectors of the economy,” he said.

“Across aviation, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, organisations began redesigning how they operate-whether it is Air India re-imagining customer engagement, Apollo Hospitals supporting clinicians, ICICI Lombard reshaping core processes, or Asian Paints bending the curve on innovation,” he added.