Let’s take a look at what Bill Gates—Chair of the Gates Foundation, founder of Breakthrough Energy, and co-founder of Microsoft—has said about artificial intelligence (AI) and the opportunities the technology creates. Before we delve into what he has said about AI, let’s first examine, from a telco perspective, Gates’ comments on connectivity and the 5G market in India. Below are edited excerpts from various interviews.
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What They Said: Timeline
2023
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates praised the pace at which 5G is being rolled out in India. He said India has "great" digital network and high levels of smartphone usage with "very good" connectivity and added this will be the cheapest 5G market.
Under India’s G20 presidency, a session titled “Building Resilient and Inclusive Economies: The Promise of Digital Public Infrastructure” was held in New Delhi.
Addressing the session, Gates appreciated India’s competitive private market and its reliable, low-cost connectivity, and went on to say this will be the cheapest 5G market. India has great digital network and very high percentage of people using smartphones, he noted.
September 2024:
In an interview with CNBC Make It in September 2024, Bill Gates shared how he defines success, what he sees as the No. 1 unsolved problem facing young people today, and how developing software in the 1970s compares with building AI tools now.
Reflecting on the early days of software, Gates said:
“Back in the early days, when I said software was important, if I had 50 people in the room, I felt like, ‘Yeah, we’re making progress here.’
Today, someone could raise billions of dollars for a new AI company based on just a few sketch ideas. I was lucky that my belief in software made me unique—or relatively unique.
Just believing in AI that's not very unique. So I would have to develop some unique view of how you design AI systems–something that other people didn't get, that even they were like, 'That's crazy.' That's raw.
If you’re just going with the mainstream view—‘AI is important’—there isn’t much value there. I hope my younger brain would look at AI today and say, ‘The way these things work is so stupid.'
He added that this mindset is what he encourages in younger technologists:
“I encourage young people at Microsoft, at OpenAI, wherever I find them, to look at the frontier. They’re taking a fresher look at this than I am, and that’s their fantastic opportunity.”
Also Read: What They Said: Puneet Chandok of Microsoft on AI
Misinformation
Gates also pointed to misinformation as the most difficult challenge facing younger generations today:
When Gates started Microsoft, he thought most people would want to use home computers — and later the internet — for purely productive and responsible purposes, he said. When he began working on the docuseries, he still harbored some of “my naivete that when we made information available, that people would want correct information,” he said, according to the report dated September 5, 2024.
“Misinformation is the one where I, a little bit, had to punt and say, ‘Okay, we’ve handed this problem to the younger generation."
Gates revealed that he realised the intensity of the issue during a conversation with his daughter Phoebe Gates.
"Hearing my daughter talk about how she'd been harassed online and how her friends experienced that quite a bit, brought that into focus in a way that I hadn't thought about before," Gates said.
“We have context where we want correct information, like, hopefully, when we want medical advice,” Gates said. “But then we kind of like, in our community and enclave, have these shared views that kind of pull us together,” he continued.
“Even I will wallow. Let’s say there’s a politician I don’t like, and there’s some article online criticizing him a little bit. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s such a good critique, [and] I enjoyed reading it, even if it was exaggerated,’” Gates reportedly said.
Gates said that he is not entirely sure about how to stop the spread of online misinformation. While acknowledging concerns about free speech, he said some limits are necessary:
"We should have to be speech. But if you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, where are those boundaries that even the US should have rules. And then if you have rules, what is it?
"Is there some AI that encodes those rules because you have billions of activity and, you know, if you catch it a day later, the harm is done."
Regarding misinformation again:
In an article titled “The risks of AI are real but manageable,” published on July 11, 2023, on Gates Notes blog, Bill Gates wrote:
"We certainly have not solved the problem of misinformation and deepfakes. But two things make me guardedly optimistic. One is that people are capable of learning not to take everything at face value. For years, email users fell for scams where someone posing as a Nigeran prince promised a big payoff in return for sharing your credit card number. But eventually, most people learned to look twice at those emails. As the scams got more sophisticated, so did many of their targets. We’ll need to build the same muscle for deepfakes.
The other thing that makes me hopeful is that AI can help identify deepfakes as well as create them. Intel, for example, has developed a deepfake detector, and the government agency DARPA is working on technology to identify whether video or audio has been manipulated."
February 2025:
Bill Gates on AI and Jobs: Read what Gates predicted about the future of AI in the story here.
Also Read: What They Said: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Others on AI
October 2025:
Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on October 28, 2025, Gates shared his thoughts on AI technology, whether we’re in an AI bubble, and the impact of AI on energy use and jobs:
“We need to define ‘bubble.’ If what we mean is like tulips in the Netherlands—where people eventually looked back and said, ‘What the heck? There was nothing there. Those were just tulips’—no, that’s not where we are.
If you mean it’s like the internet bubble, where in the end something very profound happened and the world was very different, then yes. Some companies succeeded, but a lot of companies were kind of ‘me-too,’ fell-behind, burning-capital companies. Absolutely. There are a ton of these investments that will be dead ends.”
He continued on the massive commitments being made to chipmakers and data centers, saying:
“AI is the biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime. It is so profound, and therefore its influence is hard to overstate. The economic value, this is basically intelligence. You know where you can get medical advice or you can get a tutor or you can get somebody to help you design drugs. So the value is extremely high."
“Just like creating the internet ended up being, in net, very, very valuable, you also have a frenzy. Some of these companies will be glad they spent all this money. Some of them will commit to data centers where the electricity is too expensive, or where it could have been done overseas or they'll buy a generation of chips and won’t have captured all their value before the next one comes along. But if you want to be a tech company, you don’t get to say no. Let's check out of this race."
On jobs and the labor market, he added:
“In terms of jobs, this is going to take some period of time. Although it hasn’t been seen in large numbers yet, over the next several years there will be some impact on the job market.
Nowadays, when you say that, some people react by saying, ‘How can you say that? Isn’t that going to slow the U.S. down in this race?’ But it’s only honest for people to speak frankly about the fact that this will have a big effect on the job market.”
Also Read: Indian Government and Bill Gates Explore Leveraging AI and ML in Agriculture
December 2025:
Doha Forum
Bill Gates discusses how AI can prevent a new digital divide, turning a simple cell phone into a free "virtual doctor, tutor, or farm advisor" for Africa. Speaking at the Doha Forum on December 6, 2025, the Microsoft founder noted that India's advanced digital infrastructure will be key for piloting these revolutionary AI services first. Gates emphasised that rich nations must donate cloud costs to ensure AI is accessible to everyone.
Question: Infrastructure is often cited as a major barrier to economic empowerment on the African continent. While initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area aim to reduce bottlenecks, what do you see today as the biggest barrier to economic empowerment—not just in Africa, but across the Global South? Technology and innovation are advancing globally, but unevenly. Is that the biggest challenge?
Bill Gates:
“If you look at the first stage of economic development, along with health and education, the key part of the economy is going to be agriculture, and the majority of Africans are farmers.
Ironically, even though so many people work in agriculture in Africa, the continent is a net importer of food.
It also faces headwinds in the agricultural sector: very high population growth, degraded soils, and the impacts of climate change.
It might be surprising, but I believe that if we innovate by empowering those farmers—giving them AI that provides advice, helping them understand their soils and how to improve them, giving them new seeds and new livestock—the opportunity for that sector is to more than overcome those headwinds and turn it into the primary area of economic growth.
This could make Africa not only self-sufficient, helping to solve some of the malnutrition problems, but also a significant net food exporter.
We start from a point where the average farm in Africa, per hectare, has about 20 percent of the output of a typical farm. That shouldn’t be the case.
This AI advisor—one that understands weather, prices, seed varieties, and diseases—will be one of the key elements, along with much better seeds and animal genetics, to achieve that vision.
Agriculture will continue to be the biggest part of the African economy for the next 20 years.”
Question: Turning to artificial intelligence—there’s a lot of discussion around AI. How do we prevent it from becoming the new digital divide, especially in Africa? How do we stop it from widening the gap between the Global North and South?
Bill Gates:
"One of the great things about AI is that because it uses human language, anyone who has a cell phone will have the ability to dial a number or connect through an application and simply talk to a doctor—a virtual doctor driven by AI—that remembers everything they’ve ever said about their health, every complaint, every diet issue, and every piece of advice they’ve ever received.
It will be available 24 hours a day, and this will be provided as a free service.
You don’t have to build new infrastructure. The infrastructure being built today—though there is still work to do—includes digital connectivity in Africa, getting the price of the internet connectivity down, and getting cell phones into the hands of women in remote villages. That’s already happening, though there’s much more to do.
Places like India are much further along, which means we’ll pilot some of the AI stuff in India, but we want to get it out in Africa as quickly as possible.
This is not new infrastructure. The only new piece is the cloud that runs the virtual doctor, tutor, and agricultural advisor. The rich countries working together with groups like the Gates Foundation, should be able to donate the modest cloud costs for that AI.
So it’s free. You pick up your phone, talk as much as you want to the doctor, the tutor, or the farm advisor, and you pay nothing.”
Abu Dhabi Finance Week
At Abu Dhabi Finance Week, the Microsoft co-founder and chair of the Gates Foundation told CNBC’s Tania Bryer how “deeply profound” AI technology will be in reshaping the world.
Asked what his strategy would be if he were building Microsoft today with AI at the center, he said:
“AI is the most important thing going on. Throughout the history of Microsoft, we were always thinking about when we could make breakthroughs in AI.
That digital revolution that created the internet—got everything online—that’s the foundation AI is now coming into.
For me personally, now my full-time work is the foundation. Because of my relationship with OpenAI and Microsoft, I stay very on top of the latest advances. One of the foundation's goals is to make sure the poorest in the world, the people who never meet a doctor, don't get farming advice, don't have a good tutor, that we're gonna have AI, free to them, in their native language. So they can explain their health challenge, they can explain what's going on with their crops, and what step they should take.
Making sure that, over the next 10 or 20 years, those most in need see the benefits—that’s a huge priority for us.”
When asked whether he was concerned that AI could be a bubble, he replied:
"AI is only a bubble in the sense that not all of these valuations will end up going up. Some of them will go down.
But in the sense that behind it is a technology that's deeply profound, that won't reshape the world, there's not the slightest doubt about that. That doesn't mean all of these companies, with high valuations, will all be winners. No. It's going to be hyper-competitive. A reasonable percentage of those companies will be worth that much."
He added:
"So in the sense of some overvaluation, yes. But in the sense of is this profound and real, and is going to provide all of these benefits, including the health, education and agriculture that we're working on, absolutely. Nobody should have any doubt about that."
According to a CNBC report dated December 9, 2025, Gates also predicted that the coming year would be significant for global health:
“We can take these wonderful pledges that we’ve just got and make sure we use them very effectively. It’ll be a year where we’re piloting a lot of those AI tools, the virtual doctor, supporting all the African dialects, the farm advisor... Most people in Africa are farmers who have very small plots of land, and today very low productivity,” he said.
“We want to dramatically raise their productivity, and we see that’s doable.”
This is a developing story, and more quotes and insights from Bill Gates will be added as they become available.
