No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:24:28 · Satya Nadella
[00:24:28] S0: I think we have to go through one full budget cycle on this to really see the the sort of the emergence of the equilibrium. Because at the end of the day, there's marginal cost to even generating the app. Right? In fact, there can be even a a simple way to say it, like, if you should always acquire something if the marginal cost of building and maintaining something on your own is higher. Right? That should be like, it's a quantifiable right? A quantifiable thing. And the maintenance part is important. Right? Even like, you gotta remember, like, hey. You know, all the security stuff that now AI will find, you better fix them too fast. Of course, there's a coding agent to help you with, but then that burns tokens. Right? So whose responsibility is it? It's kind of like a a cycle that you've gotta think through. And I think we have gone through the excitement that I can generate a lot of software. I think the next thing would be, what software do I really want to generate? What software do I want to use from others? How do I compose these two into some agentic workflow that I have agency over? Right? Because I think there'll be very little tolerance for anybody who's inflexible at the vendor level. But at the same time, I think that anyone who has got that flexibility, shows up, delivers the value, will be back at again. Right? We're selling software, but with just different business models, in fact.
00:25:58 · swyx
[00:25:58] S2: Speaking about building software, one of my favorite moments from, I think, a previous build maybe one or two years ago was they had a big they they there was a section of you building your own software. I'm curious if you're building anything now.
00:26:09 · Satya Nadella
[00:26:09] S0: Yeah. So I I think the you know, first of all, let's face it. Right? Building software has made it possible for even the incompetence of a CEO of a company like ours you can build. So thank god. But that said, I I I I do feel that, you know, something like GitHub Copilot to me and especially the new sessions app or the new app has just made it so much more possible for you to have agency over artifacts that you felt you couldn't touch before. Right? So for me as a CEO, even to go to a code base, to be able to learn about it like, I remember joining Microsoft long back, you know, first, and then you say, man, everybody had to go in and look at, you know, whatever, Cutler's, Malik, or what have you to learn how to do good c c plus plus code. So now that ability to be more full stack up and down is so good, but that doesn't mean every one of us should be doing the same thing. The question is how do you then have the ability to inspect things, learn things, see things? I think it's just so much more. And so to me, what I'm building a lot of is these long running foundry agents. Right? So there's autopilots. So the easiest thing is, to me, I think I just built one even last week where the idea was, hey. Can I have an agent that is continuously monitoring essentially my own chief of staff autopilot? Right? They're gonna have that, obviously, in Scout. That's what we showed. But it is so easy and trivial to build. I took it WorkIQ. I said, take WorkIQ. Go and build a Foundry long running agent. Store all the memory in using Rayfin, right, basically at my back end as a service. And lo and behold, it built it. And not only built it, I could say publish to Teams, and it published the damn thing to Teams. So the ability to have, you know, some end to end project like this complete is just pretty miraculous.
00:28:17 · Elad Gil, swyx, Satya Nadella
[00:28:17] S3: How do you think that impacts the different types of engineering roles that exist in the future? Because right now, I think there's, you know, a dozen different types of engineers that you can be from QA, front end, etcetera. You know, there's a big swath. I've heard some people argue that in four or five years, we'll basically end up with four engineering roles. It'll be people who are managing agents. It'll be forward deployed engineers or FDEs. It'll be security engineers, [00:28:40] S2: and then [00:28:41] S3: people working on large scale infrastructure for a small number of services, and then everything else just collapses into the agentic world. [00:28:47] S0: Yeah. Do you [00:28:48] S3: think that's a correct view of the world?
00:28:49 · Satya Nadella
[00:28:49] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think I think we'll have to experiment our way through it. But what you said is what there are some very at scale things. At LinkedIn, they did structurally change and, you know, basically built up a new discipline called full stack builder. Right? So they went and said, hey, let's bring people from design and product management, front end engineering, all put them together, but also have an edge. Right? It's not like the design person still doesn't have the design edge or the front end person doesn't have the front end edge, but you can give yourself bigger scope in roles so that you're not confined to one role. And then equally, infrastructures become very critical. Right? So in other words like, I mean, RLEs, I mean, one thing we have realized is even for the Excel team, for example, building the RLE in which a reward can be learned is actually one of the hardest sort of infrastructure problems. And so you kind of need even new talent, right? Distributed systems people even in what was considered an end user app team, because it's a different skill set. So yes, infrastructure, science is the other one, obviously. So I think we'll see how these evolve, right? Where's this real I mean, always the world will have a bunch of specialists. You know, I think the generalist role is gonna be the most exciting, right? Because the leverage of a generalist is where we are going to see the maximum returns, right? When you said, Hey, are you coding? I'm now a gen I basically translated knowledge work, right? Which I did, where I created a Word document or a spreadsheet or even And now I can build an app, Right? It's in the same sentence. Right? That idea that, oh, wow. My generalist skills have gotten a higher leverage, I think, is what we're gonna see across the board.
00:30:46 · Sarah Guo, swyx
[00:30:46] S1: Music to the ears of CEOs and VCs that are, like, a little dangerous and a lot [00:30:51] S2: of Golden age for idea people. [00:30:52] S1: Idea people. Yeah. With a lot of agency. If you take that idea of personal agency and you just zoom it out to the organizational context. My partner Mike Murnal, who actually started his career at Microsoft, just wrote an essay where one of the big takeaways is it's an age where you can be much more ambitious and you need to be given the pace of the environment and how quickly actually users and companies are open to adopting new technologies. How do you think about I feel silly asking this of somebody running a trillion dollar plus company already, but how do you think about how Microsoft can be more ambitious now?