Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that companies will have to rethink the very way they operate in the age of artificial intelligence. He believes that the business of the future will be built not only around human capital, but also around so-called «token capital» — the organization’s own AI systems that accumulate and scale knowledge.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that companies will have to rethink the very way they operate in the age of artificial intelligence. He believes that the business of the future will be built not only around human capital, but also around so-called «token capital» — the organization’s own AI systems that accumulate and scale knowledge.
Nadellawrote about this in a major programmatic post in X dedicated to the future of companies in the AI economy.
In his opinion, the current transition to artificial intelligence is significantly different from previous technological revolutions.
«For the first time, we can create a true cognitive loop between people and digital systems. This changes the very way we think about working within the company,» said the Microsoft CEO.
According to Nadella, traditionally the main value of a business has been human capital — the knowledge, experience, connections, intuition, and decision-making ability of people. However, now companies will have to simultaneously create and accumulate «token capital» — their own AI capabilities built on corporate data, processes, and expertise.
At the same time, the Microsoft CEO emphasizes that the development of AI does not reduce the value of people. On the contrary, human capital becomes even more important, since it is people who define goals, find unconventional connections between different areas of knowledge, and create new ideas.
«Without human control, computing power will simply run in circles,» he believes.
According to Nadella, the main challenge for businesses now is not to choose the best big language model, but to build their own learning loop on top of these models. This should become a new form of intellectual property for the company.
These are systems that are able to accumulate organizational knowledge, learn from internal processes, use corporate data to train models, and become more efficient after each interaction with users.
In fact, Microsoft CEO suggests building companies so that they can change underlying AI models without losing their own expertise. «A company should be able to replace one universal model with another without losing the knowledge of its best employee embedded in the system,» Nadella said.
Separately, he warned about the risks of excessive concentration of economic value around a small number of AI companies. According to Nadella, the world is unlikely to accept a model in which a few large AI systems receive most of the economic benefits, while entire industries gradually lose their own unique expertise.
To explain this risk, Nadella drew a parallel with globalization and the relocation of production to cheaper jurisdictions, which led to the deindustrialization of certain regions of the world. «It is not worth transferring these same dynamics to the era of artificial intelligence, where a small number of AI systems receive all the economic benefits, while entire industries lose their value,» he wrote.
That is why, according to its head, Microsoft is betting not only on creating advanced models, but also on developing a broader AI ecosystem, where each company will be able to control its own learning cycle, accumulate knowledge, and create added value based on its own expertise.
According to Nadella, this model could become a «stable equilibrium» for the future AI economy.
Recall that Microsoft is both the largest investor in OpenAI and the promoter of Copilot and Azure AI. Nadella actually publicly opposes a scenario in which all the value of the AI market is concentrated around a few models.
