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Microsoft to establish AI Center of Excellence, train 5 lakh Indians under govt’s India AI initiative

This comes a day after Microsoft announced plans to invest $3 billion in India and establish data centres over the next two years.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on stage at the Microsoft AI Tour in New Delhi. (Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is partnering with the Indian government to establish an AI Center of Excellence and train 5,00,000 Indians including students, educators, developers, government officials, and women entrepreneurs, to use AI tools by next year.

The software giant signed an MoU with the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the India AI initiative. As part of the arrangement, Microsoft will also set up AI productivity labs in 20 National Skill Training Institutes (NSTIs)/NIELIT centers across 10 states to offer AI learning courses.

The collaboration was announced by CEO Satya Nadella at the Microsoft AI tour in New Delhi on Wednesday, January 8. He also offered an overview of Microsoft’s three central AI platforms (Copilot, Copilot & AI stack, and Copilot Devices) and what they entail for Indian businesses.

“The most exciting part about even coming to India…the diffusion rate, the adoption rates are much faster. There’s not much of a distinction. I can be in Seattle or Palo Alto or I can be in Delhi or Bangalore, it’s not that different in terms of how people are talking about and applying [AI],” Nadella said during his presentation.

This comes a day after Microsoft announced plans to invest $3 billion (Rs 257.51 approx.) in India to expand key cloud and AI capabilities in the country over the next two years.

Also Read | Microsoft doubles down on India, commits to invest $3 billion for cloud and AI expansion

Microsoft on Wednesday also announced partnerships with the following five organisations in core sectors such as transport, healthcare, finance, agriculture, and education:

RailTel: Microsoft will support RailTel in establishing an AI Center of Excellence (CoE).

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Apollo Hospitals: Microsoft will assist Apollo with its data strategy, engineering platform, and integrating AI to create new intellectual property (IP) that could be used in markets outside of India. “Four healthcare Copilots (for clinicians, patients, nurses, and hospital operations) have already been identified to support this engagement,” the tech giant said.

Bajaj Finserv: The non-banking finance company is said to be “actively implementing AI use cases across workstreams, powered by Microsoft’s advanced AI technologies, with an expected annual cost saving of Rs 150 crore in FY26.”

Mahindra: The two companies plan to develop a range of AI projects that include agentic and multimodal scenarios for the automotive division, chatbot solutions for the farm and tractors division, and multilingual capabilities for the finance division.

upGrad: The Indian edtech major has entered into a three-year partnership with Microsoft that will allow upGrad users to certify its learners in AI training programmes. Content developers on upGrad will also have access to GitHub Copilot to create learning materials.

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The rate of AI adoption in India has grown by 12 per cent to 72 per cent in 2024, according to an IDC study commissioned by Microsoft.