The interests of Microsoft and the winners of the AI revolution are essentially straightforward.
That’s been one thing for Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chairman, since he recently returned from his alma mater, Princeton University, for a reunion weekend. Seniors wore jackets to class labeled “100 percent cotton” and “100 percent human,” referencing allegations that the former design was created with AI — part of a campus-wide pushback this spring.
In a blog post this morning, which he began writing during the visit, Smith writes that AI graduates across the country are “telling us what we need to hear.” He points out that Microsoft’s future depends on people being employed.
“Employees have been the lifeblood of Microsoft since the beginning,” he writes in the post. If the people of the world don’t have jobs, neither do we. And if we’re not doing our part to help people use technology to pursue better careers, then we’re not doing the job we were born to do.
Speaking to GeekWire this week, Smith acknowledged the tension between that message and job cuts in the tech sector, including at Microsoft. He addressed the issue in the post, too, citing the industry’s desire to reduce big spending on AI, as well as factors including global uncertainty, trade tensions, and corrections to previous overemployment.
“Our industry is going through some of the most dramatic changes in its history,” Smith said in an interview, while adding that “the cost of capital expansion makes it very difficult to pay for the job bubbles we have, especially starting in 2020.”
Smith cited the creation of entry-level jobs among the challenges facing graduate students.
But he also took a big view. Computer science jobs are changing, he said, not disappearing. Coding is becoming a smaller part of the job, while roles around it — including designing software, managing product development, and reviewing code — are expanding.
In the post, Smith places AI in a long line of technologies that have reshaped work without eliminating it, from the camera to the spreadsheet to email. He calls AI a “general-purpose technology,” like electricity, and says its spread will take decades, not years, because the limit is how quickly people and institutions change, not how fast models develop.
Some jobs go away, he writes, while new ones appear, and many are remade.
Smith’s advice to employees is to treat work as a set of tasks rather than a title, plan what AI can do, what a human can do with AI, and what only a human can do. For this, he takes inspiration from LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman’s new book, “Open to Work,” and its list of enduring personality traits: curiosity, creativity, empathy, communication, and courage.
The post also provides a clear corporate message, which aligns with Microsoft’s business interests. Smith says organizations need to build their own AI systems on top of frontier models, using their own data and what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls a “hill-climbing machine” for continuous testing and improvement, rather than simply hiring someone else’s intelligence.
Smith cites intellectual property ownership and data sovereignty as a key factor, saying firms should use AI without handing over hard-earned expertise to competitors’ models.
In an interview, Smith said the blog reflects months of conversations between Microsoft’s top leaders, including Nadella and Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, and that it is intended to speak to the company’s own employees as well as in other countries.
Asked what he would say to college freshmen if he were the commencement speaker this spring, Smith said he would focus on strengthening humanity over technological advances — urging them to speak up for the values they care about, help contribute to a better world, and move forward with hope and optimism.
“That’s not to say that these challenges may not be great,” he said, “but I personally believe that the human spirit is greater than any artificial intelligence that the world may have created.”
