Microsoft Copilot: MS eyes ecosystem tie-ups to make India AI-first nation

The Copilot Wave 2 will go beyond individual productivity to business productivity, said Rajesh Jha, global EVP, experience and devices at Microsoft. “We’re not building AI for social media or a commerce site. Copilot is a trusted AI companion for human agency, both as an assistant or at work,” said Jha (51), who has been leading Office 365, Teams and Bing through his 18-year journey at Microsoft, and is a key member of the Satya Nadella clan.

“The first chapter of AI was bringing AI into people’s existing workflows. The second chapter is a new AI. With Copilot we have now created a new user interface for AI where chat, search, documents, collaboration have come together with Copilot pages.”

Last month, Microsoft unveiled Copilot Pages, a new collaborative platform which uses Copilot Bizchat to pull insights web and work data into a single shareable document. He calls India as an “AI-forward nation” and wants to strengthen its partner ecosystem through tech companies like HCL, Infosys, Cognizant, L&T, because “for every dollar we make out of Copilot, our partners can make $8 to $10 more,” he said. Copilot has witnessed a 10x increase in usage in the last six months. “We really want to partner with the ecosystem in India to make India an AI-first country, an AI-first economy. Infosys disclosed they have 18,000 engineers using GitHub Copilot, generating 7 million lines of code.”

He said that projects like Jugalbandhi, Bhashini, Shiksha Copilot and Microsoft’s commitment to skill 2 million people in AI by 2025 are some of the efforts that the company is making to advance AI in the region.