EP 616: If Microsoft is haunted by AI, should everyone else be nervous too?

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life. A new report just came out that said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era. Yeah, that Microsoft, the very company that has for the most part been defining the AI area. That Microsoft, the one that is currently the second most valuable company in the world, the one that's been driving AI innovation. That Microsoft is haunted at the prospect of not surviving the AI area era. So what does that mean for everyone else if one of the key companies driving the entire industry forward is haunted by the prospect of not surviving? My gosh, what are the rest of us supposed to do? Well, I hope to answer that question and a whole lot more today on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'? All? Welcome to to Everyday AI. This is your daily livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me not just keep up with what's happening in the world of AI, but how we can make sense of it and actually grow our companies and careers with what we leverage from all this. So if that's what you're trying to do, it starts here with the unedited, unscripted live stream podcast. But if you really want to be the smartest person in AI at your company, you got to go to our website. It's a legit cheat code. Your everyday AI.com there. Make sure you go sign up for the free daily newsletter if you haven't already. Each day we recap, recap the live stream podcast of the day, but we also have all the other AI news for the day to get you. Not just keep up, but how you can actually get ahead. All right, but we're here today to talk about this story. It's actually big and you all actually wanted it. Put the, put the poll out in our newsletter and you said we need to hear about this. It's hot. Take Tuesday. I'm going to do my best to balance the facts of what's going on with some of my hot takes, but here's what we're going to be covering today. We're going to dive deeper into this recent report talking about why Microsoft CEO is fearful of AI. We're going to uncover how AI agents might disrupt Microsoft's core business. Talk about the balance of Microsoft's AI investments with their staffing moves because they've been laying off a ton of people this year and we are going to lay out six AI native business lessons we can derive from Sadia Nadella's words. All right, here is if you missed the story. Well, number one, if you missed the story, why we shared about it in yesterday's AI News that matters. It was in our newsletter late last week when this broke, but pretty big story that I don't think a lot of people were actually talking about. And I was kind of scratching my head again. One of the companies that was first to bring AI to the masses, aside from Chat GPT, it was Microsoft. Microsoft, I think, was the company really pushing AI into the enterprise. Right? When ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, most enterprises weren't using ChatGPT. But when Copilot launched shortly thereafter, based largely on the original GPT technology from OpenAI, it was Microsoft that was pushing AI to the enterprise masses. They've been building it, they've been investing billions of dollars. Yet here we are, this report from the Verge, and I'm going to read the headline and subhead here and then we're going to go into a little bit of what this report said. So the headline saddenadella is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI area. And then the subhead says worries about missing the AI market might explain the culture of fear some Microsoft are experiencing. So if you didn't read the report, don't worry. Here's the takeaways. So Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said some of Microsoft's biggest businesses might not be as relevant going forward in the artificial intelligence era, meaning real risk of decline for some of Microsoft's core services. He pointed to the example and the telling tale of Digital Equipment Corporation or dec, as a major warning. They were previously a leader in their space, I think the second biggest company in computing at one point, and they just collapsed after missing the shift to personal computing. And Nadella linked that lesson from dec's kind of demise to Microsoft, noting that Windows New Technology or Window nt, a lot of their original talent from that division actually came from DEC layoffs. So kind of he was saying no giant is safe. And he said that Microsoft must keep top talent with strong pay and meaningful work or the company will slide. Employees, according to the Burge report, didn't take this news very well. Right? So this was reportedly during an internal town hall recently earlier this month. And overall employees described a colder this is quote unquote colder, more rigid, lacking empathy, end quote culture with morale at an all time low. And that makes sense because in May and July, Microsoft laid off about 15,000 people while at the same time investing tens of billions with a b. Tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. So if you've been sleeping under a rock or maybe you know, the only thing you know about AI, maybe you're new to the show, maybe you just know about Chat, GPT and Gemini. So let's put this into framing here a little bit where Windows and well, copilot is in all of this. But Sadia Nadella fears that AI will make Microsoft products potentially obsolete. And he again cited Dec's collapse. Right now Microsoft is investing $80 billion in infrastructure to essentially try and build a dominant AI moat. Like I said so far this year, and we're not even through the entire year, essentially between the May 2025 and July 2025 layoffs, more than 15,000 people were laid off from Microsoft. And it seems like Microsoft's focus has shifted from selling software, selling hardware, to controlling the future of autonomous AI agents. And I think what he's doing here ultimately is he's making a high stakes bet. He is trying to reinvent the company, which I understand can be difficult, right? I mean we're talking hundreds of thousands of employees and slow moving ships can sink fast. That's something a lot of people don't understand. And you know, it seems like Nadella here is, is really firing a warning shot to the rest of the company saying, hey, if we don't move quicker, if we don't take AI a little bit more seriously, if we don't invest in it a little bit more, there's, there's no guarantee, right, that we will keep our spot kind of where they are right now as the second most valuable company in the world by market cap trail Nvidia. So let's take a look, you know, like your local neighborhood cvs. I bring receipts as always. All right, so let's look at how Microsoft makes its money. There's really three big categories that make up the overwhelming majority. About 3, 4 of their revenue comes from three different categories. Of course they have their gaming, their LinkedIn division, you know, their Bing search revenue devices, all those things. But the three big things, 40% of their revenue. And this is from 2024, 2024 reports. 40% comes from their server products and cloud services. 22% comes from my slides there cut off office products and cloud services. And then 10% comes from Windows. So let's break down what that actually entails. Okay, so the 40% of the server in cloud, that's Azure. Right. Azure sells compute Storage, databases, AI in the cloud. Right. To simplify here, it's used to host apps. Right. Thousands of enterprise companies obviously use Microsoft server and cloud offerings in Azure to host their apps. Data, AI workloads and big enterprise contracts just drive that bucket. The next biggest one would be their Office and cloud division. And that's essentially Microsoft 365. Right, those monthly subscriptions with add ons, including Microsoft Copilot. Right. So in most cases, enterprises are paying a monthly cost for Microsoft 365 as well as an additional monthly cost per user per month for Microsoft 365 copilot. All right, so that's about 22% of their revenue. And then 10% is just PCs, right, their, their operating system. So that's mainly from PC makers and company licenses for Windows. Okay, so about three, four there in those three categories alone. So what was Satya and Adela worried about then? Right, okay, well, if people are gonna use AI more, wouldn't their biggest bucket just grow? Wouldn't more people use, you know, Azure to host their AI apps in their cloud? Um, maybe. But I think each of those three categories in theory, do have the potential for disruption. So how might these big money makers actually be at risk? Talk about that here in a second after a quick word from our sponsors. This podcast is supported by Google. Hey folks, Steven Johnson here, co founder of NotebookLM. As an author, I've always been obsessed with how software could help organize ideas and make connections. So we built NotebookLM as an AI first tool for anyone trying to make sense of complex information. Upload your documents and NotebookLM instantly becomes your personal expert, uncovering insights and helping you brainstorm. Try it@ebooklm.google.com so in theory, Microsoft's three big buckets of revenue could definitely be disrupted by AI. Even though in theory they could some of them grow with AI, they could also be disrupted because as an example, their big bucket server and cloud, well, Google and Amazon could just build superior AI orchestration platforms that enterprises prefer over Azure. We've also seen Oracle kind of come in to be the fourth member of the big three cloud providers, which has historically just been AWS us from Amazon, Google Cloud, and then Azure from Microsoft. So Oracle with some big deals with OpenAI and with Meta that we talked about this week, well, they're starting to, you know, edge their way in there. So in theory, if these other big cloud providers have a little bit better AI hosting, well, it could actually eat into Microsoft's lead there. But the one that makes probably the most sense is the office and cloud sliver. And I think this is probably what Satya Nadella was ultimately talking about when he was kind of telling his employees that they needed to disrupt themselves. Right. Because what happens if people don't need Microsoft Word anymore? What happens if people don't need Excel or PowerPoint? And you might be saying, okay, well how would that happen? Well, what if AI agents are just writing reports? Right. What if AI agents are. Take away the need to do meetings, take away the, the need to have so many teams, calls, to have as many emails to create those PowerPoints. I think it's actually a real possibility that piece, I'm not saying it's going to go down to nothing, but when you are making $55 billion a year from selling software that AI agents kind of negate or can in the future negate the need for that very software. Yeah. I mean you are talking there about potentially losing billions of dollars, maybe in the long run, tens of billions of dollars if people no longer need access to that software. Right. And I think that's a larger conversation for another day. Right. What does the future of work actually look like as we are more orchestrating multi agentic workflows? Even if you're a non technical person, that's the future of work. Right. You are going to be overseeing, directing and checking the work of different agents. Because in general AI large language models, especially models with the scaffolding they have now, models that can reason, think, plan step by step and use all of your business data. They're better knowledge workers than the smartest of us. Right. So the future of work, regardless of what you think of it right now, is more agent orchestration. But they don't need licenses. They don't, Right. That's, that's the reality. So, okay, study. Nadella, I think has a point there because now you can just tell an agent to create a quarterly sales report instead of having to open those, you know, three, four, five different applications. It, it's not, it's definitely not going to negate the need for Microsoft Office products in the future, but it could in theory severely cut into one of their bigger buckets of revenue then last but not least, Windows. Right. So last year that brought about, brought in about $23 billion in revenue. So. Well, if you just have natural language AI interfaces replacing what us humans do on the desktop point and click environments, I don't know, maybe in the future we won't need the same type of operating systems. I don't see that happening in the next, you know, five Years, but maybe after that, I don't know. You know, there's some things even as someone that has been doing this for every day for nearly three years and yes, I'm lucky enough to get to talk to super smart people all the time at, at Microsoft and Google and Amazon and you know, all these people tackling the future of work. I think most people can kind of foresee what the next couple of years look like. But I don't know, is there a working world where we aren't using operating systems, where we're not sitting in front of a computer and all these monitors? Maybe. But I do know, at least in the short run, the very technology agents that Microsoft is investing heavily in and in just compute, they're investing in data centers. Right. Regardless, it's an autonomous agent future that Microsoft is investing in and in theory that would reduce some of their services right now. So I do get an understand and respect obviously where Satya Nadella is coming from that point, trying to disrupt the company from within because essentially saying if we keep doing the same thing we've been doing for decades, we're just going to be starving ourselves also you have to look at the human cost. Can't overlook that. And one of those bullet points from this town hall meeting was this cultural shift. It seems like according to reports, everyone's really on edge and probably with good reason at Microsoft. That's because Microsoft, like I said, has already eliminated 15,000 jobs over the past couple of months despite record financial performance. Right. Stock essentially at an all time high. The company is extremely profitable. Financials looking good. Eliminating jobs and y', all, FYI, lean in for a little secret. I told you two years ago this would happen. I told you two years ago the companies building AI would be more profitable than ever. They would invest tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and they would lay off tens of thousands of people. Go back, that's what we have our website for. We have those receipts. I've been saying that this. All right, here's, here's the Hot Take Tuesday part coming out, right. I've been saying this for more than two years before it happened. I said the big tech companies building this, they're going to be investing tens of billions of dollars into AI and then they're going to eventually have tremendous financial gains and then they're going to lay off tens of thousands of people and then eventually the rest of the enterprise world will follow suit. Right? Whether that takes a couple of quarters or a couple of years, that's to be determined. But we've already seen that happen with some of the biggest tech companies in the world. And Microsoft is no different. But they say that the cuts right now are a strategic move. Well, number one, to fund a massive $80 billion AI investment as AI itself begins to automate coding and sales roles within the company. Yeah, and you can do the math. The math doesn't matter, right? Those 15,000 people, I don't know if you say they have an average salary of $150,000, that's I don't know, two, like two and a half billion or something. So you know, obviously it's not an even exchange. You know, lay off 15,000 people and there's your $80 billion. But it's part of more of this organizational flattening that Microsoft has reportedly created. And that has kind of led to this culture of fear that we've seen in a lot of recent reports and uncertainty damaging employee morale and also fueling some recent union activity. Which leads us back to that very report from the Verge on the CEO saying that he's, quote, unquote, or sorry, haunted. And this is, sorry, not his quote, but from the Verge saying that Nadella is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era. So is that real? Is Microsoft actually at risk of not surviving the AI era? Absolutely not. No. Microsoft is, I think not just going to survive. They are going to thrive. You know, I was, I was having this conversation with a VC here in Chicago recently, right. And we were talking and drawing parallels between the, you know, the dot com bubble bust of the, of the late 90s with the impending AI bubble bust. Right. Uh, even if you are a core believer in the technology such as myself, there still will be some sort of AI bubble. But you look back at what happened in the late 90s bubble bust, I think there was maybe only one company in the top 10 of US companies that was part of that, you know, dot com era for the most part. The most. The biggest companies in the world were still in industries like consumer goods. They were still in industry like energy and oil. It's not the case now. Right. Right now the entire global economy is riding on AI, specifically the US economy as the top six companies in the US by market cap are all just now essentially AI companies. Right? Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Throw Tesla in there too if you want. Right. The, the, the Mag 7. So Microsoft is not at all at risk of not surviving the AI era. I think what ultimately, I mean we'll get to ultimately what this is all about. But look at the numbers, right? Over the last six months, the AI sector has seen insane growth. So Meta is up 23% over the past six months. Microsoft is up 30%, Google is up 48% and Nvidia is up 51%. Those are extremely lofty numbers for the biggest companies in the world. Over the past six months, those companies are averaging, they've grown by a third, which usually takes multiple years to experience that kind of growth. Sometimes a, you know, up to a decade, right? And we've seen that over the past six months from Meta, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia. But Microsoft is not at all in danger and here's why. I think they're very unlikely to be disrupted anytime soon. Well, number one, they're investing, right? They're investing in, I think what is going to be the biggest moat and that is just compute, right? $80 billion that they've invested for fiscal year 2025 in data centers building out throughout the country. Also they have entrenched distribution, right? So yeah, not only Windows, Microsoft 365 and Azure like we talked about, but GitHub, right? GitHub. There are 15 million GitHub Copilot developers and guess what, all these other companies, right? So you know, if you're working on anthropic Claude, if you're working on, you know, codecs via OpenAI, right? All these IDEs, everyone is still using GitHub. You can't not use GitHub that is owned by, that is owned by Microsoft, right? So they're not going anywhere. The other thing. So the most recent stat show that right now Copilot Studio is being widely adopted in the enterprise. 90% of Fortune 500 companies in the US are using Microsoft, Microsoft's no code, low code copilot studio to build autonomous agents. 230,000 organizations are reportedly already using it. So that's huge. Also it's. They have platform control, right between the Azure AI foundry, their agent service position that Microsoft is the leading right now, Enterprise agent factory, they might eventually lose that to Google as Google starts their rollout, maybe OpenAI's their agents SDK will start to make a bigger splash. But right now, technically, even though we don't always talk about them as much, and by we, I mean just the AI industry, the tech scene. But Microsoft still owns that space, right? Especially when you talk about you can't get around using GitHub, there's no large viable alternative, at least today. They also one of the biggest concerns for AI agents in the future of work is, well Governance. And I think Microsoft has a huge edge there. They support both Anthropic's very wildly popular MCB model context protocol. They support Google's A2A agent to agent protocol. So they're working with their competitors technically to support their technology. So they can still be a mainstay. I think it's a smart move. Right. In the same way that Nvidia invested $5 billion into Intel. Right. Sometimes you have to make strategic partners, strategic partnerships with companies that in theory you may be competing against. Microsoft also has their intra agent id, which I think is huge for agent traceability and observe observability as well. And those their observability rules right now do align with both the US and eu, which is huge. Also their hybrid architecture. They're investing heavily in smarter, better, faster chips. Right. Or what Microsoft hopes to be with their NPUs plus their cloud agents. And also they have model hedge. Right. So yes, they've relied heavily on their OpenAI partnership early on to fuel Copilot, but we talked about on the show last week that they're starting to roll out Anthropic's Claude models to power their Office products. And they're also investing even more heavily on their own internal models that they just released some of their more recent ones about two weeks ago. So I just give you a whole lot of reasons there that I don't think Microsoft is likely at all to be disrupted anytime soon. So what was all this about? Why did Sadia Nadella reportedly have this huge town hall where he reportedly said he was haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era and where he actually said that, you know, he had worries that some of Microsoft's biggest products could be completely disrupted? Well, I think it was a deliberate move to fight the dangerous complacency that comes from when large companies experience the kind of growth that we're talking about. And I think he was just framing the AI transition as an existential threat, not just another business opportunity, which I think is the right way to talk about it. And as much as I don't like having that, you know, gloom and doom mentality, I like to try to be, you know, your upbeat friend in AI. But you have to also understand that AI is an existential threat if you don't pivot, if you don't unlearn. Right. And I think this also served as a crucial, at least on paper, justification for those painful but necessary changes like the $80 billion investment that came after 15,000 people were recently laid off. And I think the goal was ultimately to force Microsoft, as one of the largest employers in the world, to disrupt its own profitable business before a competitor would because the competitors are trying to definitely disrupt them. So what does this mean for you? You're. I probably think what. Probably know what you're thinking, like, all right, cool. Jordan, I know a little bit more now about this, this Microsoft fiasco than I did 25 minutes ago. Don't worry. The reason why I came with a hot take Tuesday. Well, number one, I work for you and in the newsletter you all overwhelmingly voted for this to go over. But I think there's a lot that we can actually derive from this whole situation. I think Satya Nadella had to get ahead of it because again, let me double check. I think Microsoft has like 300,000 employees. Let's see what the latest is. Sorry, 228. All right, 2, 220 some thousand employees. Right. So you have to get ahead of it. If you're Saudi and Nadella, you have to start, you know, planting these seeds of we have to disrupt ourself. You have to do it now because they are a slow moving ship because they're one of the biggest ships in the world. Right. The Titanic can't move like a jet ski. But I think if you listen to his message now, the majority of people listening to this, you are decision makers in your own industry. You can learn from what Satya Nadella is trying to do. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this, reading and writing and I came up with six what I think are important AI mindset shifts that you can take away and start implementing within your organization. All right, ready? Here they are. Number one, don't wait for AI disruption. You need to actively cannibalize your own profitable non AI operations before competitors do. That is one of the things Satya Nadella was talking about. Just because something is profitable and has worked over the past decade or two, it doesn't mean that we should still be investing in it. Number two, you need to launch agent pilots this quarter, replacing some legacy workflows or your first attempt to replace a piece of a legacy workflow. So even if you had a standard operating procedure that has been printing money in the pre gen AI phase, there's no guarantee that that is going to continue to print any money in the next year or two. Number three, you need to focus on controlling the intelligence layer in your industry rather than just improving your existing products. I think so much of the future of competition, especially here in the US is about controlling that intelligence Layer number four, you need to invest heavily, heavily in cultural transformation alongside technology because demoralized teams can't execute when you need to actually go AI native. I don't think a lot of organizations right now are AI native. I think, you know, for the most part they're AI powered. But there's going to be a certain point, and this is what Satya Nailah is trying to do at Microsoft, where you're going to have to blow some things up, where you're going to have to maybe shift people around on your team. You might have to make some of those tough decisions to let some people go as well. But you need to invest heavily in cultural transformation because, let's be honest, people are scared of AI. People are scared of losing their jobs. People are scared about the future of work. I get it. I'm uneasy about it as well. But you have to be able to talk about it. And y' all, AI. I've said this a thousand times. Here's a thousand One, AI is a people problem, not a technology problem or a people opportunity, not a tech opportunity. All right, number five, small teams with AI can now out compete large corporations. It used to be your company's headcount could be a competitive advantage. Well, not anymore. That's disappearing rapidly if you don't unlearn and rebuild. I don't care how many sales reps you have, I don't care how big your marketing team is. I don't care how, how many field reps, it doesn't matter, right? In some instances, like I said, the big ship can take too long to turn. It can be too costly to pivot over the course of a couple of years when a smaller speedboat can pivot on the turn. You have to understand that, especially for our audience that's in that Fortune 500, that Fortune 1000 demographic, small teams can out compete you. You have to keep that in mind. You have to start having this mindset, mindset shift now and then. Number six, last but not least, you have to build new competitive moats around your company's, I like to call it first company reasoning data and AI orchestration. Not human. Not human expertise. The name of the game of business for decades has been leveraging human expertise. What does my team know in their brain that our competitors don't? That element of that certain competitive advantage is kind of gone. Now it's all about does my team? Can my team? Can my people? Can my leadership leverage AI faster than our competitors? There you go. Six AI mindset shifts to take away from this Microsoft, I don't know if I'll call it a fiasco. Let's just call it a learning moment. All right? So I hope this was helpful, but I'm going to leave you with this. If the largest company in the world that has been building AI, if the CEO of that company is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI area era, you have to take it seriously as well. This can't be a step by step, one year pilot. Let's upskill, let's reskill. I've been saying this for a long time. We've seen a lot of market disruption across the US and it's from companies that unlearn and they go AI native. So no, I don't think you should be nervous. But I think you need to take a note from what Saadia Nadella reportedly said at this town hall meeting and you need to start making those changes in your organization today. All right? Like I said, I hope this is helpful. If so, please Repost this on LinkedIn. Put together a nice little guide, called it Microsoft's DEC Moment, A Leader's Guide to Surviving AI. So if you're listening on the podcast, we always put the link back to the LinkedIn live stream. So go repost this show, all right, for our live stream audience. You go repost it now and I will send you all of this. Essentially, I do so much prep work. I have so many notes, you know, so many AI agents going and fetching me information and I'm digesting it all. So much of it, 90% of it doesn't make the cut. So if this was helpful for you, this Leader's Guide to Surviving AI that we just put together, just finished, it's going to be extremely helpful. So go repost this show on LinkedIn. I will share that to you. Thank you for tuning in. If you haven't already, please go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping the highlights from today's show and a lot more. Thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you tomorrow and for watching. Thanks Everyday for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.