Events multiply everywhere, but with the exception of the big ones, which tend to be one or two annually, it is strange for the CEO of the company to appear in the rest to sell the benefits of their products or solutions. Satya Nadella, then CEO of Microsoft, however, attended a local event held in Madrid last week. That one of the top representatives of one of the big Big Tech companies comes to give the main keynote of the meeting to talk about AI can only be for two reasons (which do not have to be exclusive): that Spain is a strategic country for Microsoft or that, as an increasing number of analysts or experts assure, we are at the beginning of the bursting of the Artificial Intelligence bubble.
Leaving aside the strategic market part, and Spain is one, the truth is that Satya Nadella’s presentation addressed some of the main concerns of the AI giants: the importance of integrating AI into company processes and data sovereignty.
Piecemeal. There are more and more CIOs and IT managers who see that AI does not satisfy the needs that arise. It is true that in many cases, the projects that have started have not achieved their objectives because they have begun to be developed without any type of strategy, without assessing the quality of the data with which the AI is fed and without studying whether the adoption of an AI for a certain process is really necessary for the company. And all of this is causing any development to now be studied more thoroughly.
Change the mentality
Satya Nadella is aware of this situation. That’s why he asks, “How can an organization use AI to change the customer experience, the employee experience, internal operations, change the innovation curve? Whatever goods or services they produce, can they do it now with more performance, in a much more advanced way and with much more speed?” The head of Microsoft advocates that organizations sit down and think again about the usefulness that AI provides to companies, agreeing with all those who claim that perhaps it has gone too quickly listening only to the siren songs that the marketing messages promised.
Adhering to that statement implies a reduction in sales although Microsoft, in the short term, does not seem to care given the financial muscle it possesses. However, it seems that Satya Nadella is watching the wolf’s ears. And if he sees it, it must be valued. You just have to remember that he was the person who resurrected the stagnant Microsoft to place it, once again, among the main companies in the sector.
To address the problem, Satya Nadella believes that the success of AI in corporate environments requires a change in mentality. “AI, in a sense, is a general-purpose horizontal technology that transcends roles and functions. You have to think about end-to-end workflows, end-to-end processes, end-to-end tasks. That mindset is slightly different than what we’re used to because we’ve built companies on a specific workflow,” he said.
And to do this, Satya Nadella did not hesitate to emulate the mass adoption of the PC in the 80s. The head of Microsoft is at that time the last time when workflows changed radically: “In the 80s you were a company trying to make a forecast. How did you do it? You had to send faxes, internal memos and, finally, make some forecast on paper. But, suddenly, email became commonplace. Excel already existed and a spreadsheet was sent in Excel via email, people would enter the numbers and get a forecast. This changed the work, the workflow and the results of the work, all at the same time.
Nadella believes that “in the age of AI, you have to think very carefully about building tacit knowledge and even incorporating that tacit knowledge into a set of weights that are controlled, a set of agents or models that are controlled. It’s not about celebrating someone else’s model. It’s about your model, your company, which makes you a unique participant in the economy. At the end of the day, that is the real currency for all of us.”
Sovereignty according to Satya Nadella
Aware that sovereignty is an issue that is of growing concern to companies, Satya Nadella also wanted to focus on this section. North American companies consider this point to be a (very) weak flank in their strategy. The sovereign clouds that multinationals on the other side of the pond are creating everywhere are an example of its importance. All of them promise that thanks to these clouds, the data remains in Europe and only the client can access it. However, the message that if North American authorities ask for this information, suppliers are obliged to provide it, is becoming more and more important. And this greatly worries the large hyperscalars.
Nadella did not respond to the statement but did briefly explain what he considers sovereignty. The CEO of Microsoft expands the classic concept of national sovereignty to the sovereignty of the company: “A company is, above all, its tacit knowledge, accumulated in its human capital and its digital systems. In the age of AI, this knowledge must end up embedded in models, agents and weights that the organization itself controls, instead of depending completely on external models.” That is to say, the true “sovereign asset” is, therefore, having one’s own corporate intelligence without it being diluted in third-party platforms.
This vision leads directly to governance and trust. Satya Nadella insists on the need to establish strict governance over data, clarity about which agents access what information and, above all, prevent the business value accumulated over decades from leaking to third-party models or businesses. To do this, it requires governance and observability systems for agents that allow them to be deployed with confidence within the company.
Nadella comes to say that the company must make a living. Something like when, at the beginning of the cloud era, companies believed that security was provided by the provider. But to avoid the doubts of those present, the CEO of the multinational seems to understand the concern of companies and countries about sovereignty. And for this reason, he assures that Microsoft’s strategy involves “managing risks through the diversification of our catalog of products and solutions.” Satya Nadella presents a risk portfolio approach: different workloads are placed in different sovereign cloud configurations. Some may run in a public cloud with customer-managed encryption and confidential computing, so data never leaves a secure enclave. Others require fully on-premises solutions: on-premises Microsoft 365, on-premises Azure, and on-premises Foundry, even with a disconnected control plane for a true sovereign on-premises cloud.
Finally, he warned that sovereignty without robust cybersecurity is illusory, in a clear message so that the client does not abandon Microsoft for a European provider, because it will not provide the same security. For Satya Nadella, cyber resilience is a game of global intelligence and cyber attacks do not respect borders. Therefore, it proposes treating sovereignty and cybersecurity as two sides of the same risk spectrum, relying on local partners but benefiting from global defense intelligence.
