The Era of the Business Idiot

Summary

Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize.Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 VicListen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot.The article revealed that — assume we believe him, and this wasn’t merely a thinly-veiled advert for Microsoft’s AI tech — Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well at work. 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. None of these tasks are things that require you to use AI. You can read your messages on Outlook and Teams without having them summarized — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."To be clear, I am deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way, but if he does, Microsoft’s board should fire him immediately.In any case, the article is rambling, cloying, and ignores Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's documented history of abusing his workers. Ten custom agents that do what? What do you mean by "other tasks"? Why are these questions never aske...