In Partnership With Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO | American Express

Thank you so much, Glenda, for the opportunity. It's a real pleasure to be with you.

I recently reread, Glenda, a book called Bootstrapping written by Thierry Bardini, I think if I get the author's name right. It was written in the early 2000s. I reread it recently because it's a book about computing and in particular about the work of Douglas Engelbart, who is very well known for being the person who first came up with the mouse, the keyboard, the graphical user interface. So, a big contributor to personal computing. And he's the one who really conceptualized this human-computer symbiosis, if you will, to augment human capability. And I felt like, in the age of co-pilots, it is good to go back to that first computer age and say, 'Well, essentially now this new generation of AI is really helping us take that vision to the next step.' And so, that's the book that has influenced a lot of my thinking in recent times.

Absolutely. It's actually a beautiful book. It has nothing to do with any technology. It's a human story of a person. In fact, one of the most inspiring parts is why did he choose his life's work, right? So, he went on this quest of saying, 'I want to make a choice.' He was an electrical engineer by training. He had many different options, and he chose this particular field of human-computer interaction because he felt that humanity needed new tools to deal with critical issues with urgency. And so, he chose this. And so, I think it's as much of a human story as a technical story.

That's always the hard one. I must say this Copilot. Even now we have something called Microsoft Copilot. It's kind of like my AI agent. And I use it, as I always say, for my travel and for my meeting prep. It's the one tool for anything. Copilot has become my go-to for lots and lots of tasks every day.

I think a lot about what keeps organizations like American Express or Microsoft or anyone relevant into the future because in some sense what happened in the past is in the past, and the question really is how do you renew yourself and stay relevant for our customers. And that I think comes from two sources, at least in my mind. One is a sense of purpose and mission, which helps with the company's ability and the people's ability to pick on things that add value. So, for example, in our case, we talk about our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And I feel that that has a lot to do with how we chose this design concept of Copilot. I don't think Copilot as a product would have gotten created if we didn't have the mission we have. So, therefore, one is going back constantly to your mission, reinterpreting that mission for today and tomorrow, not for the past. Obviously, technologies come and go. So, to be able to keep your mission constant, but technology and its expression in products and services fresh, I think is one side of it. The other side of it is culture, to your point, which is in order for us to do that, you have to have a learning culture. It's very hard to manage change and change in technology, change in business models, change in everything, pretty much, if you don't have a learning culture. And so, we emphasized internally this cultural meme, which has been very helpful to us, of growth mindset. In other words, going from being the know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. And quite frankly, right now, again, back in this age of AI, what happened in the cloud over a 15-year period, it seems to be happening now in a 5-year period. So, we now need to be the best learn-it-alls we can ever be. These would be the two things, Glenda, I would say: sense of purpose and mission, and reimagining that for what is possible today with new technology and new products and services, and then using our culture to give us that ability to pursue the mission.

No, absolutely. And I think sometimes people think of empathy as some sort of a soft skill that's nice to have, but it's not a critical skill. The way I think about it is it's a very important design skill that every business leader needs to have. Because at the end of the day we all have inherently as humans empathy for different things. Collectively we need to harness it to be able to have better insight, for example, into the unmet unarticulated needs of customers. That's at the end of the day American Express or Microsoft will be successful if we have that insight. Some people may call it design insight and skills. And I would submit that it comes from a deep sense of empathy for customer issues and customer opportunities. And so therefore I think it's not just a soft skill, but it's probably the hardest skill to learn and exercise in order to be able to be successful in business.

First of all, I'm so glad you brought up this entire thing about partnerships because I think at its core to our sense of purpose and mission of empowering every person and every organization, right there is the definition of partnerships because we will only be successful if our technology output can be parlayed by our partners into more higher value for their customers. When we work with American Express, it's that touchless expense or touch-free expense management system you build with some input from us, but you're building your own platforms, your own technology. Same thing, in fact, we're already fascinated to see how Bing Chat is being used in your customer service to be able to do better customer service responses and what have you. So, to me, that ability to take some output of ours to help our customers realize value in terms of them creating more value on top of our platform. One of the things I always think about: a platform company is a platform company only if the value above the platform is more than in the platform. That's as simple as that. Otherwise, the platform is unstable. And so, that's the approach we take when it comes to partnerships. And so, being able to have not just the technology, but the business model and a culture that reinforce it, I think, is one of the things that we seek to understand. Somebody said this to me: you can't say one thing and do something else. It has to be all congruous in how value gets created. And so, that's the approach we've taken.

Yeah, it's very interesting. As I've been studying a little bit about even different companies, different companies are successful. Sometimes companies are successful by saying we only think about customers. If I think about Microsoft, we're a little more, I think we think of our customers as our partners. That's how I think we're a much more partner-focused. How do you construct more win-win? Don't think of everything as zero-sum. Otherwise, sometimes what happens is you have customers and suppliers. I think of everybody as a customer and a supplier, so therefore they're a partner. And when you think that way, then it becomes a very different approach.

No, you're absolutely right, Glenda. There's obviously a lot going on in terms of generative AI. I would say the first time I was able to get a real sense of what the shift is was with GitHub Copilot, right? When we started seeing our software engineers start using GPT-3.5 and inside of their coding workflow see the productivity gains, see even their ability to stay in the flow of their work. That's when I felt there was something new and big. And I would say there are two really new things that are happening. One is a much more natural user interface, which starts with language but goes beyond that. It can take images, it can take speech input, and also output images and speech. So there's going to be a much more natural user interface that will change pretty much every software category out there. And then the second thing is a new reasoning engine. Just like databases back in the day helped us with digital information, this new AI neural engine will help us make sense, like summarizations or continuation. So these are the two technological foundations. And they're being deployed even on American Express in customer service, in expense management, and broadly every software category is going to be changed. And I think one way to go about this perhaps for every organization is to get it broadly deployed. It reminds me a little bit like in the late '80s when the PCs first showed up. They changed workflow. We all remember before a word processor and after a word processor, before a spreadsheet and after a spreadsheet for those of us who were there at that time working. And so I think that's the same thing that's going to happen now, which is fundamental knowledge work workflow will change across every function and every business process, whether it's in marketing, sales, support, finance. And so that's an exciting time.

That's right. And then I think your point about the humanity part. That's why I love to describe even this age as the age of co-pilots. It's about humans having more agency and more capability with computers. It's not about autopilot. It's really about ultimately human judgment, human agency matters, and giving more tools.

It's a great way to phrase it. Curiosity. Our CTO, Kevin Scott, recently said something which has stuck with me. He talks about whenever there are these new possibilities or new paradigm shifts, in our case with some new technology, it's when something hard is possible now. That's very exciting. That's fantastic. But when what was something that we considered impossible is possible, that's magical. That's what you should be curious about. What was something that was impossible that now can be made possible because of some new input or new human ingenuity. One of the areas I'm thinking a lot about with all this generative AI capability is take something like chemistry. When I think about energy and energy transition, fundamentally, what we are talking about is taking 250 years of chemistry and trying to compress it perhaps into 25 years, because we've got to synthesize some new compounds, new molecules, new materials, what have you. And so, if you take that as the challenge, then how do you apply both human ingenuity, curiosity, and this new tool and technology to go after that sort of impossibility and turning it into something that is possible.

Thank you so much, Glenda, for the opportunity. It was a real pleasure and thank you so much for the partnership as well.