India AI Impact Summit 2026: Microsoft plans to skill 20 million Indians with AI by 2030, says Amanda Craig

At the AI Impact Summit panel, Microsoft’s Amanda Craig talked about persistent AI skills gaps, and highlighted that the company plans to expand its skilling commitments to the nation. During the panel discussion, Craig revealed that Microsoft has doubled its efforts to equip about 20 million Indians with the relevant AI skills by 2030.

“This year, we upscaled 5.6 million Indians, and so we actually doubled that commitment to 20 million people by the end of 2030,” said Craig. She added, “We just announced this week, a new elevator for educators in India program, where we're partnering with local schools, their vocational institutes, with higher education institutions to teach the teachers”

This emphasises that closing the skills gap requires more than just student-focused programs. 

Microsoft’s five-pillar plan

Craig also highlighted Microsoft’s five-pillar plan that focuses on covering infrastructure, skilling, and cultural capability that helped developing countries, and helped adjust actions based on data to make sure the impact is real. 

“And then really measuring diffusion so that we actually understand how things are going, and we can have really informed interventions. So that's the kind of holistic approach that we're thinking about for public private partnership,” she said. 

Alongside education, Craig also provided insights on how Microsoft is tackling upskilling within the workforce. She talked about a 'Carrots' approach that focuses on small incentives based learning to encourage daily AI adoption. 

She said, “It's just hard to find, like, time to do a deep training program, but if you integrate, sort of, into your day to day work, make it easy with these kinds of carrots. You can really start seeing the impact and that motivates you to use the technology more.”

These small incentive-based programs include weekly Copilot tips, and hackathons for colleagues, non-tech staff, legal teams, and others to build AI skills.