Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal takes stand against Microsoft, LinkedIn after his pronoun illness post taken down

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has announced that the ride-hailing company will move its entire workload from Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to its own AI firm, Krutrim. The decision came after Aggarwal criticised Microsoft for removing a post from Microsoft-owned LinkedIn on pronoun illness, which he claimed was removed due to the platform’s AI imposing a “political ideology”.

Aggarwal, in a blog post on Friday, accused Microsoft of advancing political agendas and using AI techniques to impose what he called “woke” views. The decision to move to Krutrim is part of a larger criticism by Aggarwal of what he considers incompatible Western IT methods with Indian cultural norms.

Ola has been a customer of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services since 2017, when it announced a partnership with Microsoft to build a new connected vehicle platform for car manufacturers worldwide.

In addition, Aggarwal has also pledged to work with Indian programmers to create a social media platform based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) standards. This move is aimed at giving users control and data ownership, giving creators more power than corporations.

The move to Krutrim is expected to take place within the next week. Aggarwal said that any other developer looking to move out of Azure will be offered a full year of free cloud usage on Krutrim, provided they do not return to Azure after the year is up.

A controversy erupted earlier this week when LinkedIn’s AI referred to Aggarwal using “they” instead of “he” pronoun”. This prompted him to question the AI’s neutrality and accused the platform of having “political objectives”.

“Dear LinkedIn, this post of mine was about your AI imposing a political ideology on Indian users that’s unsafe, sinister. Rich of you to call my post unsafe! This is exactly why we need to build our own tech and AI in India. Else we’ll just be pawns in others political objectives,” Aggarwal tweeted on May 9. He also shared a screenshot of his now-removed post as it violated LinkedIn’s professional community guidelines.

In his Friday’s blog post, Aggarwal said, “DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar etc. are a uniquely Indian idea and are even more needed in the world of social media. The only ‘community guidelines’ should be the Indian law. No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned.”

“Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on ‘community guidelines’!” he added.

While Aggarwal clarified he was not against global tech companies, he said as an Indian, he was concerned these firms would dictate terms and that there could be a risk of being culturally subsumed.

“This situation brings me to the need for us to build our own Indian tech platforms. I’m not against global tech companies. But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by Western big tech monopolies, and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows,” he said.