Satya Nadella
Photo: Brian Smale and Microsoft, CC BY-SA 4.0
Born1967-08-19
Occupationchief executive officer, computer scientist, electrotechnician, engineer
EmployerMicrosoft, Sun Microsystems
Positionchief executive officer
EducationBooth School of Business, Mangalore University, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal Institute of Technology
AwardsCNN-News18 Indian of the Year, Financial Times Person of the Year, Padma Bhushan in trade and industry, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, Time 100
Highlights
“I think the basic transformation of call it, say, any per user business of ours, whether it's productivity, coding, security will become a per user and usage business.”
“Our AI business surpassed $37 billion ARR, up 123%.”
“This will drive TAM expansion and change the value creation equation across the entire economy.”
“When it comes to security, the physics of cybersecurity has changed as AI compresses the window between vulnerability and exploitation.”
“The number of customers with over 50,000 seats quadrupled year-over-year and Accenture now has over 740,000 seats, our largest Copilot win to date.”
“We are at the beginning of one of the most consequential platform [ shifts ] that will change the entire tech stack as agents proliferate and become the dominant workload.”
“It's the most important database in any company that is constantly changing every second.”
“I always say this is the UI for AI.”
“This is the next big step forward, which is a full Coding Agent built right into GitHub taking Copilot from being a pair programmer to a peer programmer.”
“And these middle innings are where all things happen, all things scale.”
“You know, we're just about getting into these middle innings of another platform shift.”
“Technologies will come and go, but the idea that this company can stay relevant by producing technology so that more and more people around the world can create more digital technology … that, I think, is the core thread of Microsoft.”
“We are going from a pair programmer to a peer programmer,”
“That very first product of ours — that BASIC interpreter for the Altair — I think says it all,”
“Nadella’s had the biggest transformation of a tech company potentially ever,”
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“I think the basic transformation of call it, say, any per user business of ours, whether it's productivity, coding, security will become a per user and usage business.”
“Our AI business surpassed $37 billion ARR, up 123%.”
“This will drive TAM expansion and change the value creation equation across the entire economy.”
“When it comes to security, the physics of cybersecurity has changed as AI compresses the window between vulnerability and exploitation.”
“The number of customers with over 50,000 seats quadrupled year-over-year and Accenture now has over 740,000 seats, our largest Copilot win to date.”
“We are at the beginning of one of the most consequential platform [ shifts ] that will change the entire tech stack as agents proliferate and become the dominant workload.”
“It's the most important database in any company that is constantly changing every second.”
“I always say this is the UI for AI.”
“This is the next big step forward, which is a full Coding Agent built right into GitHub taking Copilot from being a pair programmer to a peer programmer.”
“And these middle innings are where all things happen, all things scale.”
“You know, we're just about getting into these middle innings of another platform shift.”
“Technologies will come and go, but the idea that this company can stay relevant by producing technology so that more and more people around the world can create more digital technology … that, I think, is the core thread of Microsoft.”
“We are going from a pair programmer to a peer programmer,”
“That very first product of ours — that BASIC interpreter for the Altair — I think says it all,”
“Nadella’s had the biggest transformation of a tech company potentially ever,”
“And this is what gives me confidence in our ability to shape the next phase of growth for our company and our customers.”
“35 billion Copilot interactions have been audited by Purview to date, up 7x year-over-year.”
“We now have 35,000 paid Fabric customers, up 60% year-over-year.”
“And in Microsoft 365 consumer, we now have nearly 95 million subscribers and early signals show increasing satisfaction as we make Agent Mode the default.”
“To put this momentum in perspective, weekly engagement is now at the same level as Outlook, as more and more users make Copilot a habit.”
“The next [ way ] up from infrastructure is the agent app platform.”
“The majority of users leverage multiple models.”
“When it comes to biz apps, we are seeing a new pattern emerge as customers shift from traditional seat model to seats plus consumption.”
“The system of work behind Work IQ alone now spans more than 17 exabytes of data growing 35% year-over-year.”
“And we are very excited about the continued progress with Foundry Agent Service and how customers can now build durable stateful agents that run across time boundaries, orchestrate tools and models and close the loop with evals and improvement over long-running workflow.”
“We have seen a surge in usage of our first-party agents with monthly active usage up 6x year-to-date.”
“Copilot queries per user were up nearly 20% quarter-over-quarter.”
“I mean this is like a daily habit of intense usage.”
“We continue to increase the pace of future innovation across Microsoft 365 Copilot introducing over 625 updates over the past year, up 50%.”
“Tens of thousands of companies are already managing tens of millions of agents in Agent 365, and we expect this momentum to grow significantly as agents will increasingly need tools for identity governance, security and more.”
“Finally, when it comes to our consumer business, we are doing the foundational work required to win back fans and strengthen engagement across Windows, Xbox, Bing and Edge.”
“Monthly active Windows devices surpassed 1.6 billion, and over time, Windows value will extend to deliver [ unmeeted ] intelligence at the [ edge ].”
“And even there, if you have commitments, long-term commitments to consumption, you get discounting that is appropriate with it.”
“Second, we are building high-value agentic systems across core domains such as productivity, coding and security.”
“We offer the broadest selection of models of any hyperscaler, so customers can choose the right model for the right workload across OpenAI, Anthropic, open source and more.”
“Our Edge browser has taken share for 20 consecutive quarters and Bing monthly active users reached $1 billion for the first time.”
“Over 15,000 customers now use both Foundry and Fabric, up 60% year-over-year as enterprises connect agents to real-time operational analytical and unstructured data that Fabric brings together.”
“It was a record third quarter powered by the continued strength of Microsoft Cloud, which exceeded $54 billion in revenue, up 29% year-over-year.”
“And so overall, I think the construct as they have grown and we have grown and our customers also have different expectations in terms of their model diversity.”
“And we are on course to productize new multimodal AI-driven scanning harness as well.”
“We set new records for monthly Xbox active users in the quarter as well as game streaming hours.”
“All up, we added another gigawatt of capacity this quarter and remain on track to double our overall footprint in just 2 years.”
“So I feel like that's the direction of travel.”
“Now let me turn to the high-value agentic systems we ourselves are building on this platform.”
“And you also see this in Xbox where the team is recommitting to our core fans and players and shaping the future of play.”
“And you got to remember the model capabilities are exponential.”
“As of last week, Agent Mode is now default experience across Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.”
“And with Cowork, you now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot.”
“These models are already powering first-party scenarios like image generation in Bing and PowerPoint, and we are working towards having Transcribe-1-powered transcription in Copilot and Teams.”
“Our North Star remains the same, delivering customer value with highest quality and top-class innovation.”
“And we are seeing fast growth of our co-pilot credit consumptive offer, up nearly 2x quarter-over-quarter as customers increasingly extend copilot with custom agents tailered to their workflows.”
“In the near term, we are focused on fundamentals, prioritizing quality and serving our core users better.”
“Nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 now have active agents built with our low-code, no-code tools.”
“Our Cobalt server CPU is deployed in nearly half of our DC regions running workloads at scale for customers like Databricks, Siemens and Snowflake.”
“Cosmos DB alone saw 50% year-over-year revenue growth driven by AI app workloads.”
“Last week's Game Pass changes are one example of how we are staying responsive to customer feedback.”
“Beyond Fabric and Foundry, we are also helping knowledge workers build agents with tools like Copilot Studio.”
“When it comes to developers, GitHub itself is seeing unprecedented growth driven by proliferation of agentic coding and we are hard at work to scale and meet this demand.”
“Copilot is uniquely valuable at work where nearly every task depends on organizational context, work IQ grounds, copilot responses in the full context of an organization, including people, roles, documents and communications, all within the company's security boundary.”
“We're optimizing every layer of the tech stack from DC design to silicon to system software, the model architecture as well as its optimization.”
“We introduced MAI-Transcribe-1, a state-of-the-art speech-to-texdt model and MAI-Image-2, one of the top image generation models in the world.”
“The liquidity and freshness of that data matters with billions of e-mails, documents, chats, hundreds of millions of Teams meetings and millions of SharePoint sites added each day.”
“To help mitigate risk immediately, we simship Defender protections when updates for AI discovered vulnerabilities are released.”
“At the end of the day, it is going to come from some eval and outcome that a business has, where these agents that are working on behalf of users or with users is creating value.”
“Today, I'll focus my remarks on both priorities, starting with infrastructure.”
“In knowledge work, it was another record quarter for Microsoft 365 Copilot seat ads which increased 250% year-over-year, representing our fastest growth since launch.”
“And our agentic products in LinkedIn Talent Solutions, which help hirers automate time-consuming tasks like sourcing, screening and drafting messages have already surpassed a $450 million annualized revenue run rate.”
“We have reduced, [ docked the ] life times for new GPUs in our biggest regions by nearly 20% since the beginning of the year.”
“Over 10,000 customers have used more than one model on Foundry, 5,000 used open source models, and the number who have used Anthropic and OpenAI models increased 2x quarter-over-quarter.”
“And earlier this week, we announced our move to usage-based pricing model for GitHub Copilot as we align pricing to actual usage and cost.”
“Our Fairwater data center in Wisconsin came online earlier this month, 6 weeks ahead of schedule, allowing us to recognize revenue earlier.”
“We're also hard at work changing the way we work.”
“All this innovation is driving record usage intensity across Copilot.”
“So in other words, you continue the conversation.”
“Finally, with Agent 365, we offer a control plane that extends company's existing governance, identity, security and management frameworks to agents.”
“Already the number of Security Copilot customers increased 2x year-over-year, our data security triage agents alone handled over 2 million unique alerts this quarter, and we are helping customers secure their AI deployments as well.”
“We are evolving our family of copilots from synchronous assistance to async coworkers that can execute long-running tasks across key domains.”
“We're also seeing rapid adoption of GitHub Pilot CLI with usage nearly doubling month-over-month.”
“Nearly 140,000 organizations now use Github Copilot and enterprise subscribers have nearly tripled year-over-year.”
“It's obviously already happening with coding.”
“And so when they start seeing that the trash trajectory is compressing the workflow, improving revenue, decreasing costs, that is what's driving usage.”
“All up, over 300 customers are on track to process over 1 trillion tokens on Foundry this year, accelerating 30% quarter-over-quarter.”
“It starts with model choice.”
“Across our fleet, millions of servers are powered by our custom networking security and virtualization silicon, including Azure Boost as well as our first-party CPUs and accelerators.”
“And we delivered a 40% improvement in inference throughput for our most used models across Copilot driven by our software and hardware optimization work.”
“We are moving aggressively to add capacity aligned to our demand signals we see and we have announced new data center investments across 4 continents.”
“Quarter-over-quarter, we continue to see acceleration and now have over 20 million Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seats.”
“But I think you said it, which is, customers want predictability, especially for budgets and procurement.”
“As our largest customers scale their AI deployments, they're increasingly leveraging other services across our platform and choosing to run those workloads on Cobalt, and we are expanding Cobalt supply significantly to meet this demand.”
“With Windows, we recently announced performance improvements for lower memory devices, streamline the Windows Update experience and brought back focus to core features and fundamentals that matter most to our customers.”
“For example, Bayer is using multiple models in Foundry to create its own in-house agent platform with more than 20,000 active monthly users.”
“And Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes and Roche all committed to 90,000 or more seats.”
“You can use multiple models together to generate optimal responses.”
“So when anything gets ready, you want to bring it into the fleet.”
“It's all about taking that expertise that you have as a firm, and further amplifying it so that everyone in the company gets it, and also your products and services reflect it.”
“Looking back, in fact, the very first issue in the repo was a request to open source it.”
“You can now take a model, fine tune it in - or post train it in Foundry and then drop it right into Copilot Studio so that you can now use that post-train model to automate a workflow or build an agent.”
“We're taking really a systems approach, a platform approach, which you can expect from Microsoft across every layer of the stack.”
“Because today we are making WSL fully open source.”
“And that's sort of the ultimate equation for us.”
“And it all comes down to delivering the most tokens per watt per dollar.”
“One of the most exciting things I think that will happen over the years to come is we'll have real breakthroughs in the scientific process itself, which will really accelerate our ability to create a new material, a new compound, a new molecule.”
“You know, it's always fun to be back at Build, especially in times like this.”
“Ultimately, though, all of this is about creating opportunity to fuel your ambition.”
“And here we are, in 2025, building out this open agentic web, at scale.”
“It really brings together Chat, Search, Notebooks, Create, and Agents all into this one scaffolding that's intuitive.”
“That's just a game changer in terms of how you think about models and model provisioning.”
“If you sort of think about GitHub for software developers, Microsoft 365 and Copilot and Copilot Studio for knowledge work and business process, Microsoft Discovery is for science.”
“And, more importantly, you know, it's all about expanding that opportunity for developers across every layer of the stack so that you all can build the apps, the agents that can empower every person and every organization on the planet.”
“Windows will now include several built-in MCP servers like file system settings, app actions, as well as windowing.”
“We're excited to announce the Windows AI Foundry.”
“And our aim is to offer the lowest cost, highest scale infrastructure to build both cloud and next generation, of AI workloads.”
“Think of it as classic Moore's law plus system software optimization and the model optimization.”
“That's why today we're thrilled to announce: Grok from xAI is coming to Azure.”
“Both the content, as well as the intelligence now, can be more distributed and discoverable across the web.”
“AI has become so central to how we code, and that's why we are open sourcing Copilot in VS Code.”
“I'm very excited about Mistral, Llama, I was at LlamaCon recently with Mark, and you know, as he likes to say, he's bringing a full herd of Llama, the full Llama herd, to Azure.”
“Today we are introducing a new class of enterprise-grade agents you can build using models fine-tuned on your company's data, workflows, and style.”
“In the future, we believe every organization is going to have people and agents working together, and that means the systems that you are today using ubiquitously for things like identity, management of endpoints, security, will allow you to extend to agents as well.”
“You can assign issues to Copilot, bug fixes, new features, code maintenance, and it will complete these tasks autonomously.”
“Starting today, we will integrate these AI-powered capabilities directly into the core of VS Code, bringing them into the same open source repo that powers the world's most loved, dev tool.”
“It lets you implement and leverage the full power of large language models to enrich the services and products that you're already offering.”
“You want the same rails that you use today at scale to work across people and agents.”
“And we're riding multiple S-curves across silicon.”
“So that allows you to chat with all of your data.”
“Data: we're making a ton of data news at Build, starting, in fact, with SQL Server 2025 that's launching.”
“You know, we already support 1,900 models, whether they're response models, reasoning models, task specific, multimodal, you name it, they're all there in Foundry.”
“You know, the agentic web vision that Kevin just described, in some sense, gets us closer to even the original vision and the ethos of the web.”
“And this is pretty, pretty key for us as developers.”
“And we are adding native MCP registry that lets MCP-compatible clients discover these secure MCP servers that have been vetted by us for security performance, all while keeping you in control.”
“And saying, "Look, let's apply it to science and the scientific workflow, the scientific process." That's our ambition with Microsoft Discovery, which we are announcing today.”
“And an agent factory in Foundry, enabling you to build any AI app, any agent using any data, all running on world class infrastructure.”
“In fact, Azure is the first cloud to bring NVIDIA GB200s online and do so at scale.”
“You know, software engineering has always been about having the right tools to bring your ideas to life, continually perfect and craft and tame complexity.”
“When I started seeing code completions is when I started believing,”
Works Timeline
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