From ‘pilot tourism’ to scale: India leads the AI workplace shift: Microsoft’s Chandok

BengaluruIndia is emerging as a strong market for AI-led workplace transformation, with employees increasingly redesigning how work gets done rather than simply using AI as a productivity tool, according to Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index.The report found that 32% of India’s AI-using workforce are frontier professionals—people who actively redesign work around AI agents. This is twice the global average of 16% and the highest share among the 10 markets studied. The research is based on 20,000 AI users across 10 markets, alongside trillions of anonymised Microsoft 365 productivity signals.Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, said the next phase of AI adoption will depend less on experimentation and more on translating AI initiatives into measurable business outcomes.“The ROI debate is one of the healthiest conversations happening around AI,” Chandok said. Companies need to move beyond “pilot tourism” and identify the biggest business problems they want AI to solve, spanning customer and employee experience, productivity, efficiency and new products and services.Simply adding AI to an inefficient process will not deliver sustainable value, Chandok said.The shift is visible in India, where 78% of AI users said AI enables them to produce work that was not possible a year ago, compared with 58% globally. Meanwhile, 44% said their leadership is clearly aligned on AI, against 26% globally, while 25% said they are rewarded for experimenting and reinventing work even without immediate results.Chandok said enterprises also need to become more deliberate about AI spending as the number of models and workloads expands. Rather than relying on a single model or using a frontier model for every task, companies should adopt an open, heterogeneous AI environment and match models to specific workloads.“The conversation is moving from spending less to spending intentionally,” he said. Enterprises need to weigh token costs alongside speed, latency, governance and output quality. The objective should be “token optimisation” rather than simply token reduction.India’s advantage also lies in how employees work with AI. Some 63% ranked quality control of AI output as a top skill, while 59% identified critical thinking as a key skill. Further, 87% said they remain responsible for the thinking, underscoring the continued role of human judgment as AI takes on more tasks.Chandok said AI will create new roles, including ontology architects, AI risk and compliance specialists and agent orchestrators, while changing existing jobs as AI unbundles tasks. He described AI as a “cognitive amplifier”, making large-scale skilling critical to managing the transition.Microsoft is also building forward-deployed engineering capabilities combining domain expertise, technical skills and product knowledge to tackle complex customer problems before scaling solutions through partners. Microsoft has more than 22,000 employees in India.The next challenge is turning frontier behaviour into repeatable enterprise systems. While 34% of respondents said their organisations have documented agent workflows at the function level, compared with 26% globally, the opportunity is to translate experimentation into repeatable AI-led workflows at scale.Get the latest Business News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.