Satya Nadella on Microsoft's agent bet and AI’s trust problem

Satya, thank you for having me here in Seattle.

No, thank you so much,

Alex, for making the trip. Of course. There's a lot to cover. I want to start with the moment I feel like the industry is in, and you all touched on a lot in your announcements that are just now coming out, which is this rise of agents. You're seeing it in consumer with Muse, Grokbot, Instinct, and then what you have now with Copilot in the enterprise. And it feels like a shift that's underway. And the way I've been thinking about it, and I'm curious to hear your take on this, is it feels like there's a bit of a land grab happening for what could be the next big interface, the control plane for how people interact with their entire digital lives. You guys are taking, I think, a very specific approach with Copilot and Enterprise, which we'll get into. But starting big picture, I'd be curious to hear you react to that and what you think the moment we're in represents.

Yeah, I mean, if you sort of even track what has happened, I don't know, since ChatGPT, there's been this core evolution of what I would describe as the form factor that becomes the user experience for AI. and the AI capability, right? So if you look at even ChatGPT, it was really the GPT model, but it was RLHF on that model that made chat possible. Then it was the coding agent that sort of obviously made something like Cloud Code happen. And in fact, you know, when I look at co-pilot, co-work, it's a coding agent essentially, an agent loop, or the agent loop was the innovation. At some level, OpenClaw was the first time where you kind of anticipated a long-running agentic sort of form factor. And the models, in some sense, have gotten caught up with it. So now if you look, and in fact, two things, since the open clock came out, you installed it, you ran it on your local machine or what have you, then you have to sort of really overcome the challenges of running it long term as a long running infrastructure. and secure it, and that's where the cloud hardening of a VM or a container in which or a sandbox in which it runs is now there, and the agents that are capable of running for days and keeping coherence are there, and your ability to externalize things like memory are there. That's why we are very excited. When we launched today, In Copilot, you have all of it. You have chat, you have co-work, you have autopilots. All of that, I think, is now different form factors with different models and different capabilities. All of them have a place. I don't think it's any one thing that replaces the other. In fact, I may just go to a prompt box and use it, and then the right form function surfaces.

When you see things though like Amazon blocking Muse, which is something that recently happened, to me that is getting at the point I was making about this land grab for the interface. And I'm curious when you saw that, what did you make of it and do you foresee this being a bit of a struggle as agents become the way that more and more people are interacting with the web?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's many, many things that are at play, right? The first thing is, let's just say you designed some of the API services. or even user