Ola dumps Microsoft, to shift workload to Krutrim

New Delhi, May 13

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. Aggarwal called out to the Indian developer community to build a digital public infrastructure social media framework.