All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on AI's Business Revolution: What Happens to SaaS, OpenAI, and Microsoft? | LIVE from Davos
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
All right, everybody, we're thrilled to have the one, the only Satya Nadella here, the third CEO of Microsoft for a impromptu fireside chat with David Sachs, our czar of AI and crypto.
Chapter 2: What are Satya Nadella's views on the future of AI and its impact on white-collar work?
Satya, third CEO of Microsoft, born in India. What an incredible story. Came here right after college. And you had a little round trip to pick up your wife in your book to bring her here. Tell everybody briefly how that occurred.
Well, so that's a great story of the labyrinth that is the immigration policies of the United States, I think. My wife and I went to college together in India.
Chapter 3: How has Microsoft scaled its revenue and profits with a flat headcount?
I came here for grad school. We then got married.
Chapter 4: What is the competitive landscape of AI among major players like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI?
I got my green card and she couldn't come join because we got married. So the story goes basically, I had to give up my green card.
Chapter 5: How can the US tech stack win globally in the age of AI?
So the funny thing is I went to the American embassy in Delhi. And I said, where's the line to give up my green card? And they said, there is no such line. That would be a crazy thing to do in the 90s. So it was a strange thing to give up your green card, get an H1 so that she could join. But it all worked out. So, you know, it's a long lost memory, but it was a way to work around it.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of Microsoft's deal with OpenAI and the ownership of IP?
I wanted to ask you, having... launched a co-pilot, first with GitHub, then having a co-pilot on the desktop. You made a very bold move for Microsoft to put that in the Windows product, which I use every day, on the desktop. But you did that before it really could recognize the file system and interact with applications.
Got a little bit of a lukewarm reception, but now you've been doubling down, doubling down, and there seems to be, in my estimation, three modalities for the knowledge workers. Elon's building at XAI, what they're calling a human emulator, if you saw that leak this week, yeah?
Chapter 7: How is SaaS adoption changing in the context of AI advancements?
Where they're just building employees and just putting them into their chat rooms and email. Then you have Claude came out with Cowork this week. Incredibly powerful. People are kind of losing their minds over it. I've been playing with it for the last 40 hours. Truly impressive. What's your vision for Microsoft and how knowledge workers will actually put this to use?
Because there seems to be a gap between you know, playing around with ChatGPT and getting some interesting results and getting business results.
Yeah, so I think one of the most perhaps illustrative examples of trying to understand these various form factors is looking at coding, which is obviously a form of knowledge work or probably the best example of knowledge work. And if you think about the journey coding has been, it started with essentially the next edit suggest. That was the first time, in fact, my own belief in this entire
generation of tech really sort of got formulated when I started seeing, I think there's a codex model back in the day, it was pre-GPT-3.5. That's when NextEdit started working with some real accuracy. Then we went to chat. Then we went to actions, and now to full autonomous agents. And then the autonomous agents can be both foreground, background, in the cloud, or local.
So that's all the form factors that exist today when you're coding. And interestingly enough, if you look at it, you use all of them. It's not like there's only one form factor. So that's, I think, probably one of the other lessons. So for example, when I'm in a CLI, I can go a foreground agent, background agent, And then just literally go edit in VS Code right there, all happening in parallel.
So that sort of shows how these form factors even compose. So then you bring that to knowledge work, to your point. We started with chat. Chat with reasoning sort of goes beyond just request response, because you now have that chain of thought where you can see it work.
Now there are actions, right, essentially either through computer use or through basically skills and agent calls, so you can do actions. So that's kind of the state of the copilot today. Now, there is a way to think about You know, the theory of the mind evolution, right?
Because you need, like, if you remember, Jobs had the best line, I would say, for PCs or computers was to say, it's a bicycle for the mind. Bill had a line which I liked as well, which was, it's information at your fingertips. We kind of need now a new concept metaphor for how we use computers in the AI age. You have one?
And the one I like actually came from the CEO of Notion, which I know that manager of incredible product.
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Chapter 8: What is Microsoft's vision for knowledge workers using AI tools?
Microsoft was so dominant, duopoly in some spaces, but you really weren't up against the competition level you're up against now. I was talking to Elon, and he was sort of saying, well, building cars was pretty easy because I was up against the legacy car makers, and now I'm up against, just look at the set you're up against.
Yeah, it's a pretty intense time. I mean, so the way I always think is it's always helpful when you have a complete new set of competitors every decade because that keeps you fit. If you think about it, I joined Microsoft in 92 when I had Novell as the big existential competitor we had. And here we are in 2026. And you're absolutely right. It's a pretty intense time.
I'm glad there's the competition. It's quite honestly, at the end of the day, when I look at it, as a percentage of GDP, five years from now, where will tech be? It will be higher. So we are blessed to be in this industry. It's a lot of intense competition, but it's not so zero sum as some people make it out to be. High is getting much bigger.
The TAM and just the impact of this tech is going to be so massive. The question then of course is, I always go back to what's the brand identity Microsoft has, brand permission we have, what do customers expect from us? Sometimes we kind of overthink somehow that every customer wants the same thing from all of the competitors.
And finding that out, it's kind of a different take on the Peter Thiel thing, which is you've got to avoid competition. by really understanding what customers really want from you versus thinking everybody's a competitor.
David? Yeah, so there are a lot of heads of state here, obviously at Davos, as well as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And I think you got asked a question last night at the dinner about how they should think about AI and how to be successful. And I recall that you used the word diffusion.
And I was wondering if you could expand on those remarks, because that really resonated with some of the policy work I've been doing.
No, absolutely. In fact, what you all have been doing to make sure, in this context, the American tech stack is broadly used around the world and is trusted around the world. Because I think, when I look back, David, to me, at the end of the day, you create the technology, Really, the benefits come only by intense use.
In fact, one of my favorite studies has always been this work that an economist, I think, out of Dartmouth did. His name is Diego Komen, where he studied basically what happened during the Industrial Revolution. How did countries get ahead? And the simple sort of takeaway from that was any country that brought the latest technology into their country
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