Bottom line: Companies must build their own AI expertise and learning loops rather than simply purchasing external models to remain independent and competitive in the long term.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns business leaders against reducing their AI strategy to purchasing powerful language models. What matters instead is the AI infrastructure and training data that a company builds and controls itself.
Nadella distinguishes between two forms of capital that companies must deliberately develop: so-called token capital, consisting of proprietary AI infrastructure, models and training data, as well as classical human capital with the workforce’s domain expertise, established relationships and the ability to recognize patterns where machines still fail. According to Nadella, these two forms complement each other rather than compete.
The long-term differentiator is not access to a particular model, but the ability to learn from every AI deployment and systematically accumulate that knowledge. Such a learning loop is a company’s actual new intellectual property: every improved workflow generates better training data, which in turn accelerates the accumulation of company-specific knowledge. Companies that establish this cycle early would develop an advantage that is hardly replicable. This also makes the base AI models interchangeable without losing the accumulated institutional knowledge.
In practice, this means: building internal evaluation environments that measure whether a model actually improves against business-relevant objectives, establishing reinforcement learning environments based on real internal processes, and creating a searchable knowledge base that makes institutional memory efficiently usable.
Nadella warns against a concentration scenario in which a few AI models capture most economic value creation while other industries are left empty-handed. The comparison to the first phase of globalization is instructive here: overall economic figures looked superficially good at the time, but disruptions were real. A world in which every company surrenders value to a few models that consume everything would not be politically sustainable.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published June 17, 2026
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