[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (사티아 나델라) said the essence of corporate competitiveness in the AI era is building a loop in which people and AI learn together, rather than choosing the right model.

In a post published on social media platform X (Twitter), he said it is also clear that this AI shift is fundamentally different from previous digital innovation.

He said that while the past was about using digital systems to support people’s capabilities, the present is about forming a real cognitive loop between people and digital systems. That means it is not simply adopting a tool. It changes the way companies build knowledge and differentiate themselves.

He said companies need to grow two kinds of capital at the same time to respond to this change. One is human capital, encompassing people’s knowledge, judgement, relationships and creativity. The other is token capital, meaning AI capabilities that a company builds and owns itself. Nadella said, "As AI capabilities grow, the value of human capital does not shrink. It grows even more." He added, "People need to set goals, connect across domains and spot important patterns for AI to find its direction." He said companies must ultimately create a structure in which human capital and token capital are intertwined and grow together.

Nadella said, "You can hand work to AI. You can even hand over the job itself. But you cannot hand over learning." He stressed, "A company’s future depends on how well it continues to build up learning accumulated by people and AI together."

Nadella also laid out a specific direction. He said companies should convert internal workflows, domain knowledge and accumulated judgement into AI systems, and build a structure that improves with use. He said, "We need an internal evaluation system tailored to a company’s own performance standards, a reinforcement learning environment that uses real work data, and a knowledge base that makes organisational memory searchable." He added, "This learning loop itself will become new intellectual property for a company."

Nadella also warned about a situation in which a handful of AI models absorb and monopolise all industrial knowledge. He said, "In the wave of globalisation in the 1990s, outsourcing spread and eventually led to industrial hollowing. We must not repeat the same mistake in the AI era." He added, "Society will not stand by while only a few AI companies make money and the rest have the knowledge they built taken away for free."

As an alternative, he emphasised a frontier ecosystem rather than frontier models. He said an ecosystem in which value flows across all companies, all industries and all countries is important. Nadella said, "A platform should create more value on top of it than it takes." He added, "All companies having their own learning loops and building human capital and AI capital together — that is the stable balance we must build together."