India among fastest-growing markets for AI: Microsoft AI Head Mustafa Suleyman

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for nurturing the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) at Microsoft, housing one of its strongest teams worldwide, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said at the “Building AI Companions for India” event in Bengaluru. 

“We have one of our strongest teams worldwide based here [Bengaluru] and also in Hyderabad, working on all parts of our stack. There are extremely talented engineers and developers here,” he added. 

Speaking at a fireside chat with S Krishnan, Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the AI pioneer revealed that beyond tech talent, Microsoft is working closely with professionals who have a deep understanding of human behaviour to create more user-friendly AI systems aligned with human values.

“We are increasingly involving social scientists, psychologists, therapists, scriptwriters, and comedians—people who you might more often associate with the film industry, gaming industry, or creatives. That's an opportunity for us to synthesise more diverse perspectives,” he added. 

Suleyman is the third most prominent figure in the AI industry to visit India this year, following NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Meta’s Yann LeCun.

He previously co-founded a GenAI startup Inflection in 2022. In March of this year, he and his co-founder Karén Simonyan moved to Microsoft, following the company’s acquisition of key Inflection AI team members.

The former Google DeepMind founder demonstrated the redesigned version of Microsoft Copilot—the company's AI assistant. It features an interactive human-like voice, the ability to view a user's screen, and reasoning capabilities—all aimed at changing how users interact with technology in their daily lives.

Suleyman stated the recent breakthroughs in AI as the “first step toward distilling intelligence into algorithmic constructs.”

“My vision for AI has always been about how it can be a companion that can make every one of us feel more supported, smarter, and more capable. One of the most remarkable things about the moment that we're in is that despite all of the amazing breakthroughs that we see week after week, it can be difficult to truly appreciate how profound this very moment is going to be in the context of the full century,” Suleyman said.

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“In the next few decades, we will look back on these last year or two years as the moment when we took the first step towards distilling intelligence into an algorithmic construct,” he added. 

According to Suleyman, technology has come a long way in the past 30 years, transitioning from the creation of pixels and buttons to the development of large language models (LLMs) capable of evoking emotions through words.

“Your future entrepreneur is going to be designing the personality of the AI that you create. That is a significant mental shift that each one of us as investors and entrepreneurs, creatives, and administrators of important government services need to make,” he added.