Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella said “an enlightened immigration policy” has enabled him to live the American dream, even as he emphasised that governments had the right to determine immigration and trade policies.“American values have always been about inclusion and diversity. It’s a land of immigrants,” said Nadella, who was born in Hyderabad and completed his bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, before moving to the US in 1988.
“American technology reaching me in India is what made it even possible to dream the dream. And then, the enlightened American immigration policy is what led me to live the dream. And I think those are things we will always advocate for... the American dream and the American enlightened immigration policy, especially for high-skilled workers, is something that I’m optimistic about,” Nadella told ET in an interview.
Recent actions of the Trump administration — notably the attempt to stop immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries — have raised concerns about America’s continuing commitment to attracting the best talent from across the world.
“The overall labour mobility in the world is going to be defined by every country’s immigration policy, every country’s trade deal or protectionism. Every country, rightfully so, should think about their own national interest first,” said Nadella, who is on a three-day visit to India which will see him travelling to Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. “It’s going to be India first in India, UK first in UK, America first in America. Our job is to operate in all of these countries with these principles of local opportunity creation,” he said.
Nadella also gave a thumbs-up to the Indian government’s digital drive.
“India Stack’s vision of having a presenceless, cashless, paperless vision — which is fundamentally about bringing down transactional costs in the economy — so that every citizen, small business and large business can all benefit, is a grand vision,” said Nadella. India Stack is industry jargon for applications on the Aadhaar platform and Unified Payment Interface (UPI).
Nadella has been credited with reshaping and turning around Microsoft after he took over as CEO in February 2014. Since then, the company has focussed on a “cloud first, mobile first” model, even as it sold off non-core businesses like the phone unit it acquired from Nokia.
The company has also invested heavily in data centres across the world and pursued new business segments such as the cloud platform business, where it competes with the likes of Amazon. Cloud provides the ability of enterprises, especially small and medium businesses, to purchase computing and data storage capacity, rather than invest capital on their own.
Under Nadella’s watch, Microsoft also made the largest acquisition in its history by snapping up business networking company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in June 2016.
Nadella allayed fears that the dawn of artificial intelligence will lead to large scale unemployment in heavily populated countries like India.
“In a country like India, where there is going to be a services-led economy, there are going to be many, many jobs. There are many things AI will never be able to do… (like) show empathy,” said Nadella.
“When there is a lot of artificial intelligence, real intelligence will be scarce, real empathy will be scarce, real common sense will be scarce. So, we can have new jobs that are actually predicated on those attributes.”
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