India’s developer community on GitHub poised to surpass US by 2027: Microsoft CEO

India’s developer community plays a pivotal role in building cutting-edge products and solutions that solve challenges for the nation and can be deployed around the world. With 13.2 million Indian developers using the Microsoft-owned software platform GitHub currently, India is predicted to surpass the US as the largest developer community by 2027, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

He was addressing over 1,100 developers and technology leaders at the Microsoft AI Tour in Bengaluru today. “There is a lot of innovation happening around Copilot and it’s exciting to see India as a place where the momentum around developers and development is unbelievable. Indian contributors working on Gen AI projects on GitHub are the biggest next to the US,” he said.

The tech honcho also said that Microsoft will expand its Code Without Barriers program to India this month, as the company aims to democratize access to tech skills nationwide. The program was launched in 2021 across nine Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries to help close the gender gap in the region’s fast-growing cloud, AI, and digital technology sectors. Through Code, Without Barriers, Microsoft will provide skills and certification to 75,000 women developers in India in 2024.

Nadella underscored that it is important for developers to understand and harness the capabilities of platform shifts in a bid to drive economic growth. “That is what grounds us in our mission to empower every person and every organisation in India to be able to achieve more as fast as possible and really take advantage of this platform shift. That means empowering developers in India to be able to build products, services and scenarios not only for India but for the world,” he said.

Further, he also highlighted the efforts being made in India to build Indic LLM. Nadella expressed his excitement about the work being done by Indian start-ups such as SarvamAI. He also mentioned the efforts being made in India by Shiksha Copilot and the Open Healthcare Network.