Microsoft’s Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘downside’

A few weeks after Merriam-Webster was mentioned “down” as his word of the yearMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella thought about what to expect from AI in 2026.

In his classic, intellectual style, Nadella wrote his own your blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “nonsense” and start thinking of it as “mental bikes.”

He wrote, “A new concept that changes the ‘thinking wheels’ so that we always think of AI as a reservoir of human potential versus a replacement.”

He continued: “We need to go beyond the logic of slop vs sophistication and create a new way of thinking about our ‘mindset’ that gives people new tools to develop this wisdom as we work together.”

If you look at the text, you can see that he is not only urging everyone to stop thinking of AI products as inferior, but also wants tech companies to stop talking about AI as on behalf of the people. He hopes that the industry will start talking about it as a tool to help people instead.

Here’s a problem with that design, though: Most AI marketing uses the concept of changing people’s jobs as a way of selling its price, and justifying its price.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI have been sounding the alarm that the technology will soon cause unemployment. For example, in May Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI they can eliminate half of all public servicesraising unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years, and doubled it last month. interview on 60 Minutes.

However at this point we do not know how true the doomsday figures are. As Nadella points out, most AI tools today don’t replace workers, they are used by them (as long as the human doesn’t care. checking the AI ​​function for accuracy).

Another oft-cited study by MIT is still ongoing Project Icebergwhich aims to measure the economic performance of the project as AI becomes operational. Project Iceberg estimates that AI can currently handle about 11.7% of human paid jobs.

Although it has been noted that AI can replace about 12% of jobs, the Project says that its estimates are how many jobs can be offloaded to AI. It then calculates the payment associated with the downloaded service. Interestingly, a the works he cites as examples include automated nursing notes and computer code written by AI.

This is not to say that there aren’t jobs that have been significantly affected by AI. Professional photographers and bloggers are two examples, according to Substack Blood In The Machine. So there is a lot of unemployment among them new grad junior coders.

But it is also true that highly skilled engineers, writers and programmers create better work with AI tools than less skilled ones. AI cannot replace human expertise.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that as we enter 2026, some data is emerging that shows the jobs where AI has advanced the most are becoming more effective. Vanguard financial report for 2026 found that “nearly 100 jobs with the most AI are outpacing the overall labor market in terms of job growth and real wage growth.”

The Vanguard report concludes that those who are making good use of AI are making themselves more valuable, irreplaceable.

The irony is that Microsoft’s actions last year contributed to the AI-is-coming-to-our-jobs story. The company quit more than 15,000 people in 2025as it recorded its income and profits last fiscal year, which ended in June – citing success with AI as a reason. Nadella also wrote a public memo of dismissal after these results.

In particular, he did not say that the success of AI has caused wounds. But he he said that Microsoft had to “rethink our work for the new era” and called “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three goals in this era (the two are security and quality).

The truth about job losses due to AI in 2025 AI is very difficult. As Vanguard’s report says, this was not only about working within AI and more about common business practices that are not very interesting for investors, such as eliminating funds in areas that are slow to accumulate that they are growing.

To be sure, Microsoft wasn’t alone in laying off employees in pursuit of AI. The technology is expected to result in nearly 55,000 jobs being laid off in the US by 2025, according to research from the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. CNBC reported. The report cited big cuts last year to Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other tech companies chasing AI.

And to be fair, those of us who spend more time than we should on social media laughing at AI-generated memes and close-ups would say that slop is One of the most interesting (if not the best) features of AI is usedtoo.