Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks AI will reshape what companies fundamentally are.
A "real cognitive loop" is forming between people and digital systems for the first time, Nadella writes in his blog. In addition to human capital, companies will also need "token capital" going forward, meaning AI capabilities they own and control.
Nadella gets specific about what that requires: Companies should build proprietary learning systems. Private evals should track whether AI models are actually getting better at business-relevant outcomes. Internal training setups should improve models with real company data, and institutional knowledge should become queryable and reusable.
"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," Nadella writes. "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."
The real test is whether a company can swap out the base model without losing the knowledge it has built on top, Nadella says. The Microsoft CEO is, of course, arguing his own book here. Microsoft trains its own AI models, but so far they lag the competition. The company is instead trying to keep enterprises locked into its Azure and tooling stack, for example, through AI bundle deals tied to Office products.
