Microsoft has released the India findings of its flagship Work Trend Index 2023 report. The report is titled: “Will AI Fix Work?” and is based on a survey of 31,000 people across industries in 31 countries, including 14 Asia-Pacific markets. It includes multiple signals from emails, meetings and chats across Microsoft 365, along with labour trends on LinkedIn.
The data shows that the pace of work has accelerated than humans can keep up and it’s impacting innovation. As per the report, AI is poised to create a whole new way of working and organisations that move first to embrace AI will break the cycle by increasing creativity and productivity for everyone.
“As the nature of work evolves, AI promises to be the biggest transformation to work in our lifetimes. The next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth, removing the drudgery from our jobs and freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation. The opportunity and responsibility for every organisation and leader are to get AI right—testing and experimenting with new ways of working to build a brighter future of work for everyone. This will require not just investing in AI, but also ensuring that every employee has the necessary AI aptitude to thrive in the new world of work.” said Bhaskar Basu, Country Head of Modern Work at Microsoft India.
The report also shares a few key insights for business leaders as they look to understand and responsibly adopt AI for their organisations.
Drudgery debt is costing innovation
The report points out that all users are carrying digital debt as the volume of data, emails and chats has outpaced the ability to process it all. However, the report claims that there is an opportunity to make the existing communications more productive.
Every minute spent managing this digital debt is a minute not spent on creative work, the report adds. More than 75% of Indian workers have said that they don’t have enough time and energy to get their work done. These people are three times more likely to say that they struggled with being innovative.
Within Microsoft 365, the average person spends nearly 60% of their time communicating, and only over 40% creating. Moreover, an overwhelming 78% of Indian workers have also agreed that they lack uninterrupted focus during their workday.
More than 80% of Indian leaders have also said that they’re concerned about the lack of innovation. Indian workers have also blamed their productivity gets affected by “inefficient meetings,”. Also, nearly 50% of employees feel that their absence in half or more meetings would go unnoticed by colleagues, the report notes.
New alliance between AI and employee
While nearly 75% of Indian workers are worried about AI replacing their jobs, more than 80% of workers are ready to delegate as much work as possible to the technology to reduce their workloads.
Over 3 in 4 Indian workers said that they would be comfortable using AI not just for administrative tasks (86%) but also for analytical work (88%), and even creative aspects of their role (87%).

100% of Indian creative workers who are extremely familiar with AI would also say that they will be comfortable using AI for creative aspects of their job. Meanwhile, Indian managers are 1.5 times more likely to say that AI would provide value in the workplace by boosting productivity rather than cutting headcount.
Importance of AI aptitude among employees
The report also notes that every employee, not just AI experts, will need new core competencies like prompt engineering in their day-to-day work. 90% of Indian leaders said that employees they hire will need new skills to be prepared for the growth of AI. Nearly 80% of Indian workers said that they don’t currently have the right capabilities to get their work done using AI.