Global health philanthropist Bill Gates is guest at Express Adda in Mumbai today

Gates, the Microsoft co-founder-turned-global health philanthropist, will be the guest at Express Adda in Mumbai on Thursday. He will be in  conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group.

This is Gates’s third visit to India in three years. He will also discuss his new book, Source Code: My Beginnings, which traces his childhood, his early vision for the future, and his passion for new ideas.

The man who brought computers into people’s homes sees artificial intelligence as the second major technological revolution, the first being the graphical user interface that paved the way for modern operating systems.

Gates, specifically, sees AI as a game-changer in healthcare, capable of bridging critical gaps — from helping health workers screen for diseases in remote areas to fast-tracking groundbreaking research. And when it comes to India, he believes the country is at the forefront of innovation. On his website, he writes that India is a place where “big challenges meet even bigger ambitions, and where innovation is transforming lives at an incredible scale”.

He highlights India’s remarkable achievements in public health — from eradicating polio and preventing HIV to expanding childhood immunisation. Now, with cutting-edge diagnostics and AI-powered tools, the country is accelerating efforts to eliminate tuberculosis.

But India’s influence extends beyond healthcare. Gates sees it as a global leader in digital transformation, pointing to innovations like Aadhaar and the digital payments system as examples of how technology is reshaping everyday life on an unprecedented scale.

Since stepping down from Microsoft’s board in 2020, Gates has dedicated himself fully to philanthropy. In India, the Gates Foundation has been working on public health, particularly maternal and newborn health, immunisation, sanitation, agriculture and the girl child in collaboration with the government, businesses and other organisations.

Express Adda is a series of informal interactions with newsmakers in the presence of a select audience. Guests have included Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, actors Pankaj Tripathi and Tabu, oncologist and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee, musician T M Krishna, ecologist Romulus Whitaker and writer William Dalrymple.