Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on AI's Business Revolution: What Happens to SaaS, OpenAI, and Microsoft? | LIVE from Davos

**Jason** (0:00)
All right, everybody, we're thrilled to have the one, the only, Satya Nadella here, the third CEO of Microsoft for a impromptu fireside chat with David Sacks, our czar of AI and crypto. Satya, third CEO of Microsoft, born in India, what an incredible story. Came here right after college, and you had a little round trip to pick up your wife in your book, to bring her here. Tell everybody briefly how that occurred.

**Satya Nadella** (0:36)
Well, so that's a great story of the labyrinth, that is the immigration policies of the United States, I think. My wife and I went to college together in India. I came here for grad school, we then got married. I got my green card, and she couldn't come join because we got married. So the story goes basically, I had to give up my green card. So the funny thing is I went to the American Embassy in Delhi, and I said, where's the line to give up my green card? And they said, there is no such line.

**Jason** (1:14)
That would be a crazy thing to do in the 90s.

**Satya Nadella** (1:17)
So it was a strange thing to give up your green card, get an H1 so that she could join, but it all worked out. So it's a long lost memory, but it was a way to work around it.

**Jason** (1:29)
I wanted to ask you, having launched a copilot first with GitHub, then having a copilot on the desktop, you made a very bold move for Microsoft to put that in the Windows product, which I use every day, on the desktop, but you did that before. It really could recognize the file system and interact with applications.
It got a little bit of a lukewarm reception, but now you've been doubling down, doubling down and there seems to be, in my estimation, three modalities for the knowledge workers. Elon's building at XAI, what they're calling a human emulator, if you saw that leak this week, where they're just building employees and just putting them into their chat rooms and e-mail. Then you have Claude came out with co-work this week, incredibly powerful, people are losing their minds over it. I've been playing with it for the last 40 hours, truly impressive. What's your vision for Microsoft and how knowledge workers will actually put this to use? Because there seems to be a gap between playing around with ChatGPT and getting some interesting results and getting business results.

**Satya Nadella** (2:36)
Yeah. I think one of the most perhaps illustrative examples of trying to understand these various form factors is looking at coding, which is obviously a form of knowledge work or probably the best example of knowledge work. If you think about the journey coding has been, it started with essentially the NextEdit suggest. That was the first time in fact my own belief in this entire generation of tech really got formulated. When I started seeing, I think there's a codex model back in the day, it was pre-GPT-35.
That's when NextEdit suggestions started working with some real accuracy. Then we went to chat, then we went to actions, and now to full autonomous agents. And then the autonomous agents can be both foreground, background, in the cloud or local. So that's all the form factors that exist today when you're coding. And interestingly, if you look at it, you use all of them. It's not like there's only one form factor. So that's, I think, probably one of the other lessons. So for example, when I'm in a CLI, you go a foreground agent, background agent, and then just literally go edit in VS code right there, all happening in parallel. So that sort of shows how these form factors even compose. So then you bring that to knowledge work, to your point. We started with chat. Chat with reasoning sort of goes beyond just request response, because you now have that chain of thought where you can see it work. Now, their actions, right, essentially either through computer use or through, you know, basically skills and agent calls. So you can do actions. So that's kind of the state of the copilot today. Now, there is a way to think about, you know, the theory of the mind evolution, right? Because you need, like, if you remember, you know, Jobs had the best line, I would say, for PCs or computers, was to say, if you, it's a bicycle for the mind. Bill had a line which I liked as well, which was, it's information at your fingertips. We kind of need now a new concept metaphor for how we use computers in the AI age.

**Jason** (4:54)