India needs its own tech platforms: Ola CEO

Rebuking Microsoft and its subsidiary LinkedIn, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal in a post said India needs to establish its own tech platforms to shun the chances of being “culturally subsumed” and “governed” by western big tech monopolies.

Boycotting Microsoft, Aggarwal said Ola -- an existing customer of Microsoft Azure -- will no longer avail of its services, and will shift its entire workload to its homegrown Krutrim cloud in a week. The backlash comes after LinkedIn removed the CEO’s post that called out LinkedIn’s AI for “imposing a political ideology on Indian users”. He had shared a screenshot from a generative AI response that used “they/their” pronouns to describe Aggarwal. Berating the “pronoun illness”, he had said he hopes the practise doesn’t reach India. “...the pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India. I wouldn’t have waded into this debate but clearly LinkedIn has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it.