Satya Nadella Says Microsoft Is Rebuilding Around AI Agents as Trump Pushes ‘Super Intelligence’ — From 11,000 Models to Agents That Work on Your Behalf
Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella said the company is reorganizing around AI agents, model choice, and cheaper computing for the "Super Intelligence" era, betting on custom chips, PCs running models locally, and agent-management tools, according to his annual letter.
Nadella Bets on Agents, Model Choice and Cost
Nadella said the company has organized its business into "two new reporting segments: Agents and Infra and Devices and Consumer." He described the change as a shift in how people use computers. “With agents, we can now macro delegate and micro steer," Nadella noted, adding that users define a goal and the system "works on our behalf, returning for direction and judgment when needed.”
The Microsoft chief also said that customers will increasingly measure the cost of tokens against the outcomes they produce, calling this the “cost-to-outcome” frontier.
Nadella said that Microsoft offers more than 11,000 models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Space Exploration Technologies Corp‘s (NASDAQ: SPCX) SpaceXSI, and others, along with its own MAI family, which it expanded with over a dozen new models this year. Nadella described "a new multimodel system where the harness — including context, memory, and action space — is separate from the model.” This architecture "optimizes the cost-to-outcome frontier” by allowing the company to use the “right model for the right job," and "strengthens business continuity and resilience because models become interchangeable," according to Nadella.
He also framed customer control as a test of the era, noting that customers should be able to “switch out a ‘generalist’ model without losing the ‘company veteran’ expertise accumulated in their learning system.”
Copilot, Chips, and PC in the "Super Intelligence" Era
Nadella said Microsoft 365 Copilot has moved "from synchronous chat assistants to asynchronous agents that can complete complex, long-running tasks," and it has surpassed 30 million paid seats. Meanwhile, Agent 365 is meant to be "the control plane for agents," letting companies manage them "the same way they manage people."
Nadella said Microsoft’s Maia 300 chip delivers 40% “more tokens per watt compared to leading GPU-based systems," and that he expects first-party silicon "to power a greater share of our fleet." Microsoft will still support the latest chips from Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC).
He also pointed to the PC. Nadella said that inference "will increasingly move between cloud and client,” and intelligence can "effectively become unmetered as more and more capable models run locally." He cited Microsoft’s more than 1.6 billion monthly active Windows devices, noting that the company has an installed base “to deploy this at massive scale, driving demand for more capable PCs and an entirely new class of agent-first devices.”
Trump’s Push for Rebranding AI
President Donald Trump has ordered the federal government to replace “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence,” and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI. The rebranding could be a signal of how closely Silicon Valley is aligning itself with Washington’s emerging technology agenda.
Trump’s Sept. 29 executive order, titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” directed federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official communications, websites, reports, and other non-statutory documents.
Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has also agreed with Trump that the word “artificial” doesn’t exactly sell the technology’s capabilities.
Shares of Microsoft closed 0.20% higher at $532.95 on Wednesday, and were down 0.50% after hours. Year-to-date, the stock has surged 10.20%.
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