There is a comparison that the artificial intelligence industry had kept out of the public conversation until now. Satya Nadella brought it up this Sunday in a post on X that garnered over a thousand responses in just a few hours. The metaphor he used is "industrial offshoring".
Just as the first wave of globalization hollowed out industrial economies, wiping out factory jobs and decades of competitive advantage with consequences we still feel today, artificial intelligence threatens to do the same to corporate knowledge.
The Silent Drain of Expertise
The mechanism Nadella describes is concrete. If an organization hands over its workflows, its domain knowledge, and the accumulated judgment of its teams to external AI models, those models absorb it.
What was once a unique advantage, now could become a generic capability available to everyone.
