Satya Nadella on Cloud Computing in India： Future Insights

In terms of the contribution that India is likely to make over the next three to five years for Microsoft, both top line and bottom line. Thanks, Shireen. It's a real pleasure to be here. For me, it's all about the cloud and what we're doing here. Not as much, in fact, just about our technology. We're very, very thrilled about having opened up our data centers here and bringing some of the world-class AI and cloud technology. But what's happening with that technology is what excites me. It's the entrepreneurs, startups, and in some sense even scaled-up organizations like Flipkart using it to become competitive, to come up with their ideas. Public sector using the cloud to bring about next level of efficiency, whether it is the government of AP doing high school dropout predictions using the cloud, or the government of Punjab analyzing speech samples of their call center to improve their services. It's that tremendous public sector, big business, small business work that's happening. That's the most exciting thing for us. In terms of the growth projections for India, and I know data is the new currency, which is why I'm trying to pin you down to give us some color on what we could expect in terms of growth as far as the India business is concerned, given the opportunities that you see. To us, we don't obviously break down our thing by country. But the thing that I would say is, we've always said for every dollar we have made in India, we would have at least three to four dollars that are made by the channel and others in India. Now take that opportunity, and in the cloud era, that in fact is just going to get further amplified. Take the public sector. In the past, public sector organizations were just not able to consume some of the new technology we had because it required a lot of capital investment. Whereas now, when you're doing elections in the UP, they're in fact able to put cameras on polling stations, stream that into the cloud, analyze and monitor the polls, and then after the election, they can dehydrate it all. So it's much more accessible for the small business, the large business, and the public sector. So I envision whatever business we have built over the last 30 years in India is only going to accelerate because from a secular perspective, there's going to be more computing and more use of that computing. So more strategic partnerships like the sort we've seen you ink with Flipkart. You did one with Tata Motors to push your connected technologies with in-car connectivity. What can we then expect in terms of strategic partnerships in India? In fact, tomorrow we'll be even talking about another new initiative with the State Bank of India. State Bank of India, as you know, one of the largest banks in India, is all moving to the cloud. As a regulated entity, this is, I think, a very big milestone for them to adopt the cloud, bring the next level of productivity tools for all employees of the bank and how they, in fact, work with their customers. So that's another big initiative. We're also working with the India Stack in a very strategic way. So when we're bringing our cloud, it's not just about our cloud, but how does it compose or work with and integrate with the India Stack? We, in fact, are going to launch Skype with Aadhaar authentication. So if you can, as a consumer, now not only use Skype, but you can, in fact, use Skype to access, whether it's bank accounts or it's a ration shop or anything else, because of the ability to have the India Stack come to their work right in Skype. Since you're talking about leveraging the India Stack, what has the experience been like working with the government? You're working with the central government, you're working with state governments individually as well. What's that experience been like and what have been the lessons learned? I must say it has been a tremendous change in India when it comes to technology. In fact, I would say what the government has done in terms of building out the Aadhaar infrastructure and even the vision of going from presence-less to paperless and so on is just very enlightening. So the way at least we look at it is, if anything, how does the technology adoption across the broad spectrum of the industry and the economy get facilitated by the work we do as well as the work the government does? Because ultimately it's about removing friction and lowering cost so that there can be more computing that can help every Indian and every Indian organization. For 2017, what does the outlook look like both in terms of the demand environment? You're here to talk about future decoded. In terms of disruption, what would be the next big areas for tech disruption? I think the biggest change that's happening, whether it's education, whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, the new currency or public sector, clearly the currency is data. Not just about collecting data, but how do you create intelligence insights from that data? And directly tying that to the top-line, bottom-line improvements, whether it's crop yield improvement or factory floor improvement, that's how people are going to measure it. They're not going to measure it by just any new technology and the buzzword, but ultimately how is technology being used to build better margin in cars, better margin in any widget or in agricultural crop production or public service? That's, I think, what's exciting, where technology has to show up as true productivity gains in the economy and reducing the transaction cost. And I think the combination of India Stack and some of the work we're doing can truly absolutely make it happen. Since we're talking about productivity, I think the debate also centers now around what does this disruption mean in terms of employment, in terms of underemployment, in terms of jobs creation? When we talk about AI and we talk about living in an AI world, this is something that governments around the world are concerned about, including what's happening in the US. How do you address some of those issues? And what do you really see in terms of hiring prospects, for instance, and the creation of new-collar jobs, as we now like to call them? No, it's absolutely a real issue in the sense that whenever there is new technology, there's always going to be displacement. And the real challenge, I think, in front of all of us is how do we commit ourselves to doing some of the very best work in upskilling people, whether it's students graduating from college, acquiring the absolute right skills for the new jobs that are getting created, or even some mid-career workers who get displaced. How do they acquire new skills? We're very, very excited about LinkedIn and what LinkedIn can do. And especially around the white-collar workers, I think LinkedIn already has that very efficient closed loop between skills you need, the jobs that you aspire to get, and how do we match the two. And so we now, in fact, will be announcing tomorrow about a new project called Project Sangam, which is an extension of what we have done with LinkedIn to more of the middle-collar, new-collar workers. So, for example, hospitality, I think, can be a great source of employment going forward. But the question is how do we train people in the hospitality industry? So we are building out this open platform so that the people with the skill training capability can pull their training. People with the jobs, corporates and others, can put their jobs in it. And we will bring essentially the same technology we had in LinkedIn to help both upskill the workforce for these various vocational training jobs and then also find the jobs that they really aspire to get. I want to talk to you about the U.S. and the Indian IT industry is concerned about what could happen in the U.S. with the Trump administration. You know, it's surprising, especially here in India, to see CEOs of large corporations come out and speak out publicly against an executive order, which is what companies like Microsoft and you specifically have done. How do you see this playing out? I mean, overall, for me, I always go back to the two core principles for us. As a multinational company, for us, we want to make sure we do our very best work in creating economic opportunity in every country that we participate in. For example, in India, I have to be able to talk about India first. What have we done for India's economic growth? In America, it's America first, and in the U.K., it's U.K. first. The second principle for us is as an American company, we'll always stand for what I think are the enduring values of America. It's a land of immigrants. We stand for inclusion and diversity. And so these are the two core things that will drive how we advocate for any policy or against any policy in any country, for that matter. So I really always go back to these two guiding principles. I'm a perfect example of that, because if it was not for American technology reaching me growing up in India, I wouldn't have been able to dream the dream, and I wouldn't have been able to live the dream if it was not for the enlightened immigration policy of the United States. So having benefited from those two, and that personal experience is what informs what we do. You know, when you talk about, as a corporation, you're looking at America first, you're looking at India first, and that defines your business strategy for a particular region. But when you have politics that demands companies to say it has to be America first, you have to create jobs in America, we'll look down upon you, or we'll impose tariffs and barriers and so on and so forth, if you move jobs out of America, how does that impact business decisions? I mean, ultimately, you know, we are all subject to the laws of the land. So if any country has policies that really dictate economic opportunity creation that is specific to that country, we have to essentially deliver on that. Because ultimately, I believe what's going to happen is every country, as it looks at their own national interest, will also come to the conclusion that none of us live in isolation. They will look for fair trade deals, and in the context of fair trade deals, they'll want to get world-class technology to be part of their economy. And so I don't sort of take any swing towards nationalism or globalization as a permanent swing. These are all, both have to be kept in balance, and that's what we're seeing out there. So my final question, you know, the headlines, Microsoft has got its mojo back under Satya Nadella. What kind of pressure does that put on you? Well, to me, I think they're really the two things that I always think about. In fact, what is my job? One is that sense of purpose. We're 42 years since we were founded. We really want to stay true to the reason we were founded, which is to create technology so that others can create technology, and culture. Because I think most large organizations, sometimes after success, forget that perhaps the culture that you have today and tomorrow is more a determinant of future success versus any past success you had. As long as we stay focused on really renewing that learning culture and the sense of purpose that we have, I think we will remain competitive, and more importantly, rich.