Microsoft’s Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘dirty’

Two weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” its word of the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about what to expect from artificial intelligence in 2026.

In his classic intellectual style, Nadella wrote on his personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “dirty” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.”

He wrote: “A new concept develops ‘bicycles for the mind’ so that we always think of AI as a scaffold for human potential versus a replacement.”

He continued: “We need to move beyond regression versus complexity arguments and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our own ‘theory of mind’ that explains why humans are equipped with these new cognitive amplification tools when we communicate with each other.”

If you analyze these clips, you might see that not only is he urging everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as trivial, but he also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a replacement for humans. He hopes the industry will start talking about it as a productivity tool to help humans instead.

Here’s the problem with this framework: Much of the marketing of AI agents uses the idea of ​​replacing human labor as a way to price them and justify their cost.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI have sounded the alarm that the technology will soon cause very high levels of human unemployment. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in May that AI could take over half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, pushing unemployment to 10% to 20% over the next five years, and he doubled down on that last month in an interview with 60 Minutes.

However, we currently do not know how accurate these doomsday statistics are. As Nadella points out, most AI tools today do not replace workers, but are used by them (as long as humans don’t mind verifying the accuracy of the AI’s work).

One frequently cited research study is MIT’s ongoing Iceberg Project, which seeks to measure the economic impact on jobs as AI enters the workforce. The Iceberg Project estimates that AI is currently capable of performing about 11.7% of paid human labor.

While it has been widely reported that AI is capable of replacing approximately 12% of jobs, the project says what it actually estimates is how much jobs could be offloaded to AI. It then calculates the wages associated with that discharged work. Interestingly, the tasks she cites as examples include automated paperwork for nurses and computer codes written by artificial intelligence.

This does not mean that there are not jobs that are strongly affected by AI. Corporate graphic artists and marketing bloggers are two examples, according to a subgroup called Blood in the Machine. Then there are the high unemployment rates among newly graduated entry-level programmers.

But it’s also true that highly skilled artists, writers, and programmers produce better work using AI tools than those without the skills. AI cannot yet replace human creativity.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that as we head into 2026, some data is emerging that shows that the jobs where AI has made the most progress are actually booming. Vanguard’s 2026 Economic Outlook report found that “nearly 100 occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases.”

The Vanguard report concludes that those who use AI brilliantly make themselves more valuable and irreplaceable.

The irony is that Microsoft’s actions last year helped create a narrative that AI is coming for our jobs. The company laid off more than 15,000 people in 2025, even though it posted record revenues and profits for its most recent fiscal year, which it closed in June — citing success with artificial intelligence as the reason. Nadella even wrote a public memo about layoffs following these results.

Notably, he did not say that internal AI efficiency led to the reductions. But he said Microsoft must “reimagine our mission for a new era” and described “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three business goals in this era (the other two are security and quality).

The truth about job losses attributed to AI through 2025 is more nuanced. As the Vanguard report notes, this had less to do with internal AI efficiency and more to do with normal business practices that are less exciting for investors, such as winding down investment in lagging areas to pile into growing areas.

To be fair, Microsoft wasn’t alone in laying off workers in its pursuit of AI. The technology was said to be responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the US in 2025, according to research by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, CNBC reported. This report pointed to significant cutbacks last year at Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other technology companies chasing artificial intelligence.

To be fair, those of us who spend too much time on social media laughing at AI-generated memes and short videos would argue that slob is one of the most entertaining (if not the best) uses of AI, too.