Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is winning Big Tech’s AI war. Here’s how

Welcome to?Fast?Company?Daily, our daily newsletter on?LinkedIn, featuring a free article selected each day by our editors as well as a roundup of great advice on careers, hiring, innovation, and technology.

Visit?fastcompany.com ?for our top stories and breaking news.?

From Fast Company print magazine: This 22-year-old book helped Microsoft’s Satya Nadella conjure AI’s future

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s job is to focus on the future—especially the company’s sprawling, ambitious forays in artificial intelligence, the subject of our September issue’s cover story . But his mind often turns to the past and the lessons he can draw from it.

During Nadella’s AI-centric Build conference keynote in May, he recommended one book to attendees to help them understand the era ahead: M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine , a biography of J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990), the psychologist and computer scientist whose vision of “man-computer symbiosis” presaged the graphical user interface, the internet, and the current AI boom.

Read more on Fast Company.

Don’t miss these top stories:

• Here's a simple playbook for new managers (or anyone who wants to improve their leadership ).
• Allegations that Amazon is failing disabled workers put the ADA and reasonable accommodations back in the news. This employment attorney explains the law.
• Of course the posters for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games are high art.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is winning Big Tech’s AI war. Here’s how

By Harry McCracken

A quarter of a million people have gathered to hear Satya Nadella talk about AI.

It’s just after 9 a.m. on a Tuesday in May, and Microsoft’s CEO is kicking off the company’s annual Build developer conference. Attendees have packed a gleaming new high-rise building at the Seattle Convention Center for his keynote, but they’re far outnumbered by those streaming it from around the world. The turnout is no surprise. For months, generative AI software that can create text, images, and other content with humanlike flair has been devouring the tech industry’s attention. And, unexpectedly, Microsoft is in the lead.

In fact, Nadella has presided over so many generative AI product unveilings this year that he takes a moment on stage to acknowledge their frenetic pace. “It’s not like I came in on January 1 and said, ‘Let’s start doing press releases,’” he jokes, wearing a hoodie and high-tops and looking very much like a developer himself. “But it does feel like that.”

Microsoft has been at the forefront of the tech world’s AI race because of the landmark partnership Nadella struck with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which—in return for a reported $13 billion investment—gives the software giant first dibs at the startup’s current and upcoming technologies. As the results have begun showing up in new and upcoming versions of Microsoft products, from GitHub to Bing to Excel to Azure, they’ve greatly boosted the company’s standing in relation to peers such as Amazon and Google. For the first time since its 1990s heyday, the company is widely regarded as the pacemaker in technology’s next historic wave of change.

“The fact that Microsoft even has a leadership position is super important,” says analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “If you’d asked me two years ago, ‘Give me 1, 2, and 3 [in AI], I might have put Microsoft at No. 3—or 4.”

Backstage after his Build speech, as another Microsoft executive’s presentation about AI-powered cloud applications buzzes in the distance, Nadella leans forward in his seat and stresses that this seeming inflection point has been a long time in the making. Microsoft has been reengineering itself into an AI company for some time—quietly but dramatically. “What happened in the last five months,” he says, “was work of the last 10 years.”

What it leads to could be the capstone of Nadella’s already remarkable career .

Read the full story on Fast Company.

Follow us on?LinkedIn ,?Twitter ,?Instagram ,?Facebook ,?and TikTok .