Satya Nadella is apparently a religious genAI user, and I do wonder whether that's a "local surplus" of capacity there that could justify some further cost-cutting, as per the glorious mysteries of progress.
Nail on head, Edwin. Judging by this Bloomberg article, his usage of "AI" appears to veer into the pathological.
Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
But I think it's this part that might offer a glimpse behind the recent idiocy:
For now, Nadella is still trying to earn his keep. He’s sought to rally the troops by telling them to forget about the successes of the past and be ready to abandon what’s worked up to now, says Charles Lamanna, a vice president who oversees Copilot Studio and some other products. “The last five years we spent building, it doesn’t matter. It’s not worth anything anymore,” he recalls Nadella telling them. “Burn the ships.”
Burn the ships, indeed. Along with the shipwrights because a chatbot will obviously do a better job than a human. ChatGPT/Copilot/Clippy is after all renown for being absolutely infallible.
But it's a dangerous situation when a delusion takes hold so firmly that reality becomes irrelevant. It's not an "enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value"; it's the inability to understand the various industries they are in, plus an incomprehensible pride in an increasing CAPEX on tulip-hoarding facilities.