Satya Nadella describes how lessons from Microsoft’s history apply to today’s boom
Episode publishedPodcast: Cheeky PintCheeky Pint
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Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO in 2014, but he's been with the company for more than thirty years and has seen a lot. Microsoft has grown by 10 x in the time Satya has been running it, and he's credited with Microsoft's success, first in cloud and now in the AI boom. Cheers, John. That was great. So what should people be excited about at Ignite?
The Ignite conference for us more than anything else is about making sure that AI is getting diffused inside of the enterprise. If there is one thing, it's more about, hey, what does it mean not to just admire somebody else's AI factory or AI agent, but how to build your own AI factory. So organizing the data layer turns out to be probably the most complicated thing which spans the enterprise such that it could meet the intelligence. So that's the stuff that I think we'll probably do a lot of.
We still don't really have deep research in a corporate context.
We do. That's what Copilot is about.
But most people day to day do not have this. So are they just underusing AI that exists?
In fact, it's interesting you brought that up because to me that is the killer feature, right? So, the biggest thing we did was we took this graph that is underneath what I think is the most important database in any company, right? Which is underneath your email, your documents, your Teams calls, what have It's the relationships that by the way, people are not working in an ad hoc fashion in an unstructured way, they're all doing it in relation of some business event. Yes. That semantic connection is in people's heads and it's lost. And for the first time, there's much better recall of Yes.
Why do you think this is underpenetrated than the enterprise? Because I feel like people are using lots of, you know, LLM tools. They are uploading individual documents maybe, but I don't think most companies have the all sing, all dancing. All of the company's context is plugged into their everyday AI
app. Yeah. In fact, I would say there are two sets of things. One, it's starting. I mean, you know, I I always say, at least compared to anything we have done in terms of all the Office suites over our history, this is the fastest in that sense because it's change management. At the end of the day, you got to get it in, people love to use it. By the way, in the enterprise setting, it has got to mean all e discovery has to work, all of the data governance has to work. We have had to plumb this purview into Copilot such that anytime I'm trying to retrieve something that's confidential, it's labe
for decades of your company's data at your fingertips. My favorite example of this is I really like the book Soft War on, you know, the history of Oracle, and it talks about Larry Ellison doing EBCs. I think they're talking about one in Japan in the nineteen nineties. So it's the late nineteen nineties, and he is pitching executives on all your company's data in one place. Part of the reason this is an evergreen pitch is because companies don't actually have all their data at their fingertips. Companies do not eat their data infrastructure vegetables. The pitch to executives is always, You can
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