Microsoft CEO: Ignore ‘conventional wisdom’ about AI—it can already help you be more productive at work

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is defending the role of artificial intelligence — particularly in the workplace — like it’s his job.

AI can help people boost their productivity right now, Nadella said during a virtual appearance at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2024 last week. Longer-term, it could help take on roles, even involving decision-making, across “healthcare or in finance or any other domain,” he said.

“I don’t need to see more evidence … to know that this is working and is going to make a real difference,” said Nadella.

Nadella’s defense of AI tools — including Microsoft’s Copilot, which Nadella uses to automatically prioritize his email inbox, he said — is no surprise. Investments in AI development are expected to surpass $1 trillion “in coming years,” according to a recent Goldman Sachs report, and Microsoft is a leading investor — giving ChatGPT-maker OpenAI $13 billion in funding, to date.

All that money has yet to yield a tool that actually helps most businesses earn more revenue, the Goldman Sachs report said. For many workplaces, the results so far include AI tools that can check your grammar, take notes during meetings and help kickstart some creative brainstorming.

“AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do,” Goldman Sachs head of global equity research Jim Covello told the report’s authors.

Complex problem-solving might be at least a decade away, New York University psychology and neural science professor Gary Marcus told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” in May. AI spending “is not sustainable in the long term,” Marcus said. “[AI companies] either need to make it better, which has proven really difficult, or they need to find some killer use case, which they haven’t, really, because the performance is unreliable.”

Nadella acknowledged that AI’s benefits haven’t yet outweighed its costs, and said its effectiveness will take time to be reflected in profits. His pitch, in a nutshell: If you familiarize yourself with AI at work now, you’ll be ahead of the learning curve once it’s reliably useful for more than administrative tasks.

Employees who start using AI do find that it helps with productivity, but just over two-third of “desk workers” say they’ve never used the technology at work, a Slack Workforce Lab survey of more than 10,000 professionals found in March.

“I think this is really the time not to swim with conventional wisdom. Be playing with the technology,” said Nadella. “In fact, be introspective as to where you are in your ability to adopt new stuff and change processes, because I think that’s going to key.”

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