Humans Or AI? What Did Satya Nadella Pick?

One of the biggest technological companies in the world, Microsoft is undergoing an interesting transition period between artificial intelligence and human workforce. The company has been rapidly building AI models to replace human workforce, but things have not been going smooth.

In this reaction, Sathya Nadella, who is of Indian origin and is the CEO of Microsoft has made a very interesting assessment of the current situation.

According to Satya, every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns. Importantly, human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows.

The Microsoft CEO believes that human agency will be the driver of token capital growth. Humans will set ambitious goals, connect dots across domains, build relationships, and recognize patterns that matter most. Without human direction, you have compute running in circles.

This means the real opportunity is not in picking the best model but instead in building a learning loop on top of models where human capital and token capital compound.

You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning. The future of the firm is the ability to compound that learning across people and AI, this is the assessment that he made on this topic.