Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has insisted that cyber resilience must be an essential pillar of any strategy surrounding sovereignty. He cautioned that autonomy without access to global threat intelligence can create vulnerabilities.

While countries are increasingly building sovereign data infrastructure, and mandating that local data remains within the country’s borders, Nadella noted that cyber threats can come from any part of the world, and it is important for sovereign infrastructures to be open to the global intelligence around these threats.

Nadella, who was here on Thursday as part of the Microsoft AI Tour, argued that cybersecurity today is fundamentally “a signals game, an intelligence game”, making it vital that nations and enterprises benefit from global threat visibility. He urged leaders to view sovereignty and resilience not as competing priorities but as a single risk equation. Microsoft, he said, gives govts and enterprises a range of choices across public, private, and sovereign cloud offerings.

Nadella also announced strategic partnerships with Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI.

Each of these companies will deploy over 50,000 Microsoft Copilot licenses-collectively surpassing 200,000 licenses-and setting a new benchmark for enterprise-scale AI adoption. This comes a day after Microsoft committed $17.5 billion in investment in India, focusing on AI infrastructure, skilling, and sovereign capabilities, marking Microsoft’s biggest investment anywhere in Asia.

Nadella also underscored that the next era of innovation will be defined by a fundamental shift in how developers build solutions. He stressed that technology must advance outcomes, not innovation for its own sake. The classic SDLC (software development lifecycle), he said, has to evolve into a new form of AI-driven SDLC. Data, he noted, becomes the core of this shift. “When we talk about context engineering, it’s a little bit of good old data engineering… where you want to get your data into the shape that allows you to feed it to the intelligence and then orchestrate around it.”

Nadella spoke about the value of the AI LLM Council, a decision-making framework inspired by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy’s idea, where multiple large language models-including GPT, Gemini and DeepSeek-act as “council members”. A chair model then synthesises their collective reasoning.

Nadella illustrated this with an example: asking the council to select an all-time Indian cricket XI. The models agreed on legends like Sunil Gavaskar, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Kapil Dev, R Ashwin and Jasprit Bumrah, while debating choices such as VVS Laxman and Anil Kumble versus Zaheer Khan.

Nadella described this multi-model debate as “a chain of debate, not a chain of thought”-a glimpse into the next generation of metacognition, where AI agents contribute to human decision-making by reasoning, disagreeing, and synthesising outcomes.

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