India is one of the fastest growing markets for Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, which saw a 250% year-on-year growth in deployment with 20 million seats globally, Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, told ET.
“India is truly leading the pack,” he said, noting a significant rise in Copilot licences.
“The question now is not if AI is coming. The question is how do you really architect for it,” Chandok said. “Frontier firms (are) thinking about a business which is human-led, but agent operated… Humans in command, but agents doing all of the execution (of) transactional work.”
The Redmond, Washington-headquartered firm on Wednesday is set to announce that Infosys, TCS and Wipro are scaling their Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to over 100,000 employees each. This takes the collective commitment past 300,000 seats in under six months.
The company said this marks one of the largest and fastest enterprise AI rollouts for Microsoft globally, and a clear signal that leading organisations are moving from tool-level deployment to AI as an operating model, with agents now working alongside people across business-critical workflows.
Speaking to ET ahead of the announcement, Chandok said IT services firms were deploying AI at three levels – individual productivity and performance, processing and workflows, and finally how they can do more AI work for their customers.
Banking and manufacturing industries in India are also deploying agents in a big way, he added.
“IT services are obviously leading the pack because that’s (AI) core for them,” Chandok said. “But I’m seeing this reinvention at scale. The shift that’s happening is a lot of experimentation and lab projects to add scale, development and impact. And really thinking about durable enterprise value. Banking, manufacturing, digital leaders, public sector (enterprises) are all thinking about Copilot to make their employees more productive.”
In the context of scale, he said the focus is on infrastructure and he spoke of the $17.5-billion investment in data centres in India for which deployment will happen over four years. The Hyderabad region goes live in the next quarter, he added.
When it comes to token maxxing, Chandok said Microsoft is narrowing it down to two critical metrics – intelligence and trust. He said it was essential for models to understand the organisational context and that was where Microsoft would come in as it has an IQ layer.
“If you’re using the Microsoft stack, our ability to understand who works with who, how does work get done... All of that is encoded into your organisation. So, first is translating that IQ layer for your company,” he explained. “There are more agents in your company than you know. At Microsoft, it’s gone up by 15x in the last 12 months. Agent 365 allows you to track every agent. So it’s (token maxxing) is a crackable problem, it’s already been solved with Agent 365. But again, we’ll continue to iterate with this as we all learn this better,” he said.
