Satya Nadella, Microsoft's Chairman and Chief Executive

**Danny Fortson** (0:04)
A friend of mine was listening and he really, he thought it was hilarious when we were talking about all the tech terminology. And I have a new one.

**Katie Prescott** (0:13)
Go on.

**Danny Fortson** (0:14)
Katie.

**Katie Prescott** (0:14)
Danny.

**Danny Fortson** (0:15)
Have you ever had a jam session?

**Katie Prescott** (0:17)
Isn't that where you play music with your friends?

**Danny Fortson** (0:19)
No, it's where you sit with your other tech friends and jam on ideas about how to change the world. So when people often talk about having, we were up all night jamming last night on AI, for example. They were ideating about MVPs.

**Katie Prescott** (0:36)
My God.

**Danny Fortson** (0:38)
Have you ever ideated?

**Katie Prescott** (0:39)
I haven't ideated, I haven't jammed, but I think maybe we should do some jamming ideation on the podcast.

**Danny Fortson** (0:46)
Isn't that what we've been doing?

**Katie Prescott** (0:47)
Maybe, maybe that's all this is. Well, hello and welcome back to The Times Tech Podcast with Katie Prescott here in London, the City of London.

**Danny Fortson** (0:59)
And Danny in the Valley, Danny Fortson in Silicon Valley.

**Katie Prescott** (1:04)
And today we've got a very special episode because we're bringing you my interview with Satya Nadella. He is the boss, the chairman and chief exec of Microsoft, only their third boss in their 50 year history. And as we speak, he's zooming around the world on an AI tour and he made a whistle stop drop into London on Monday to make an important announcement. So it was a good chance to hear first hand really what one of the most influential figures in tech is thinking at the moment. And particularly obviously around AI where Microsoft has just been leading the charge. And it might not surprise you to know at all that he's pretty buoyant. If only the rest of us could keep up.

**Danny Fortson** (1:44)
Yeah, so I've been watching what Microsoft been doing. I think it's so interesting because as we discussed before, they are the biggest investor in OpenAI, but they got right up to 49% so they didn't have to buy it. But they clearly have made this bet a few years ago. I saw that this week they announced their quote unquote new virtual employee or autonomous agent kind of function, whatever you want to call it. And these things quote, understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf.

**Katie Prescott** (2:15)
Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? Exactly as you say, I think Microsoft has been leading in making generative AI really practical for companies. So everyone's been crying out to use the technology. They really want it. They're very thirsty for it. Boards are saying, we need AI. We need AI. And Microsoft has very quickly merged their relationship with OpenAI and turned that into tools. And it started off with what they call co-pilot. So, assistant, essentially, as it sounds like, co-pilot, that runs through all of their programs. So it can be Excel or it can be Microsoft Teams to transcribe information from a call and summarize it, or to do a first draft of an email. But this autonomous agent announcement, and they don't like the virtual employees line, by the way. I used that in one of my articles and it was...

**Danny Fortson** (3:04)
Did you get a stern email the next day?

**Katie Prescott** (3:06)
Well, no, I just queried whether it was a quote from someone at Microsoft, which it wasn't, but it was my way of trying to explain to people what these things are, which are essentially, rather than a copilot, which helps you on a task, it can do the whole thing end to end for you, if you instructed to do so. For example, if a client emailed you, where you'd be running a business and chased out where a shipment was, the bot would scramble away, find the information, pull it all together because it's got access to your database, draft an email and ping it back to the client without you even having to know about it if you don't want to. So that's what becomes really extraordinary. You get as many as you want, infinite numbers of these little bots that can run around doing jobs and ideally take some of the pressure off the work that humans do, the grunt work that we all do. And so that was what he was in town to announce.

**Danny Fortson** (3:58)
Is it a little bit like, you know, you think about Chad GPT, probably everybody who's listening to this podcast has used it or Claude or one of these things. They are shackled by the little search box, the little conversation box. Is the idea that these agents, you're kind of freeing them from that box and they can go out and do other stuff in the rest of your life.