Microsoft CEO Nadella on How AI Can Change Workflows

00:00The big challenges with all of these new technologies is when work, work artifact and workflow changes That means We as firms have to change how we work. In fact, I remember meeting the CEO of Generali, you know, a few years back, and he was describing he had joined the firm, you know, pre pc-era and and he was describing how, for example, they worked with their agents in the field with faxes, interoffice memos and and suddenly the PC showed up and people would then put a spreadsheet in an email and sent it around and the entire workflow and the work process changed. Right. So similarly, I think with a AI, you are going to start seeing actual change in how what happens. I mean, even in fact, for me coming to Davos, you

00:57know, what about 50 bilateral meetings I have preparing for those how to had a particular workflow, right, which is that has to be my field team would prepare notes that would come to my HQ and that would get further refined. And nothing had really changed right since I joined in 92 to essentially even a few years back. Whereas now, I just go to Copilot and say, Hey, I'm meeting Larry, please give me a brief and it comes back and use me. By the way, the one nice thing is it gives me a 360, right? It knows what we are doing with you as a client, what we are doing as a client of yours and everything, I mean, as an investment. It's so it captures event information unlike anything else. In fact, what I do is I take that and immediately share that back with all my

01:43colleagues across all the functions. I think about it. It's a complete inversion of how information is flowing in the organization. It's not like this classic. We have an organization, we have departments, we have these specializations and the information trickles up. No, no, no. It's actually it flattens the entire information flow. So once you start having that, you have to redesign structurally. So the current structure may not make sense because you want people to be able to work in a way that allows them to have this information flow freely. So what all this leads me to, if I have to sort of say, what's the formula? The formula, I think it starts with the mindset. So the mindset we as leaders should have is we need to think about changing the

02:37work, the workflow with the technology, then that needs skill set. So you can sort of talk about this in the abstract. You got to use it like, so if I'm not using that, you have to trust it, you have to trust it, you have to use it, you have to learn even how to put the guardrails to trust it, right? You can't again, you can't just be afraid of it. It's going to it's going to be diffuse. So the question is, as a firm, you have to use it to learn how to even put the guardrails that allow you to be able to trust it. So skills, so mindset, skills. The other big consideration really is how do you make sure you have the data set that you're feeding like context. It's kind of like you have a new intelligence layer, but the intelligence

03:27layer is only as good as the context you give it. So people describe it even as context engineering. But that is what firms do, right? If you think about what do firms do, it's all about the tacit knowledge we have by working as people in various departments and moving people and information. So the question is, how do you really have this AI also have that context? So these are sort of some of the new things that have to percolate throughout an organization to take advantage. In fact, that's why I think you're going to see that challenge of why am I not seeing immediate results in productivity? Because you have to do the hard work. In fact, that's why it's not going to be some you know, it's going to they're going to be firmwide differences.

04:12They're going to be they could be sector wide differences, but it's going to fundamentally be because of the leadership within an organization.