- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI must bring clear societal benefits or risk losing public support.
- Nadella urged AI developers to focus on improving health, education and productivity
- Otherwise, people will reject AI’s use of energy
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fears that if artificial intelligence does not begin to bring real, measurable benefits to society, people will become fed up with it and its price, ending its current form of existence. The Davos stage is a strange place and audience to preach the good of society over other goods, but it certainly helped his comments stand out.
AI developers “have to get to the point where we use this to do something useful that changes outcomes for people, communities, countries and industries. Otherwise, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense,” Nadella explained in a conversation with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.
“We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens do not improve health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness, across all sectors, large and small.”
The Davos audience, accustomed to the leadership role of digital transformation, seemed a little confused. But the discussion also shows how the AI hype is both an illusion and a reality. Nadella should know what he’s talking about. Microsoft is one of the main drivers of the current AI boom, with tens of billions of dollars invested in OpenAI, its own Copilot suite integrated with productivity tools, and a seat at almost every major AI policy table.
But his message at Davos was that leaders are now demanding awareness – not just about how intelligent or useful AI tools are in theory, but also about their ability to help people in schools, clinics, small businesses and municipalities.
This is not an abstract moral argument. It’s a question of infrastructure. The growth of AI has been driven by immense computing power, which means it is also driven by massive energy consumption. Training today’s largest models consumes as much electricity as some small countries consume in a year.
Look on it
And inference, when you run the model on your phone or desktop to answer a question or generate an answer, adds to that cost with every second of execution. AI doesn’t just use servers; it powers an ever-growing footprint of data centers, water-cooled systems, and network-straining workloads.
Nadella’s phrase of social permission goes to the heart of what might be next. Until now, the public has largely accepted that cloud-based technology companies can use resources in exchange for productivity, entertainment or convenience. But this goodwill is not guaranteed. If AI starts to feel like an unnecessary luxury, bringing novelty rather than necessity, citizens and governments may begin to respond.
Value for AI energy
During the session, Larry Fink asked whether all this talk of productivity would lead to fewer jobs, and Nadella didn’t dismiss that concern. But he argued that AI’s potential lies in amplifying what people can do.
But this moment is different from past technological inflection points. The scale of the appetite for AI. Cloud computing has gradually developed. Smartphones had physical limitations. But AI can develop as fast as the models and capital behind it allow. This is why Nadella’s call to focus on results is as prudent as it is pragmatic.
Nadella’s message was simple but precise: We are nearing the edge of public tolerance for black box systems powered by opaque amounts of energy, with unclear societal benefits.
And maybe we should all be asking ourselves harder questions when the next shiny AI tool comes out: Does it help me? Does this help anyone? Or is it just burning energy to generate another token?
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