Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project To Wall Street and His 20 Million Followers
- Reference: 0184832500
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/08/03/1934211/microsoft-ceo-touts-his-own-diy-ai-project-to-wall-street-and-his-20-million-followers
- Source link:
> During [2]Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call , CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report, which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ( [3]'Magnificent 7' companies ) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a "not financial advice" disclaimer). "It would be fun for you, Adam. I think one of your colleagues put out an ROIC [Return on Invested Capital] document. I took that document to Copilot, which is a PDF, and I said, 'Build me a new Power BI dashboard, essentially.' But here is the thing. It built a rich semantic model that went into my Fabric with OneLake that brought all the data in from the external sources. In fact, it was current with all the SEC filings of all the MAG7. And then on top of that, the repo itself is in GitHub, but the artifact is sitting in my Copilot as a site. That, to me, is a classic example of an enterprise-wide workflow. I, as a knowledge worker, could go create a dashboard. The data engineer can go to Fabric and find the artifact. The professional developer can go to the repo and find it in GitHub. And by the way, it's all registered with Agent 365. That's a little bit of what Amy is describing as the coming together of a new way to work, even while at the same time, bringing IT, security and manageability of it."
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> After Nadella's show-and-tell drew an underwhelming response during the call ("That's very helpful. Thank you." said the Morgan Stanley analyst whose team's work Nadella scraped with AI), Nadella turned to social media with posts on LinkedIn (12M followers) and Twitter/X (8M followers) to make the case for why his DIY project was such a brilliant demonstration of how AI enables governance, controls, security, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, data analysis/modeling, visualization, usability, and value. "Some more detail on the ROIC Intelligence App I built yesterday and mentioned on today's earnings call," [4]Nadella wrote on LinkedIn. "I took the PDF that Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley put together for Hyperscale ROIC this week and used Copilot code (coming in our new superapp) with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan, then used autopilot in auto to create the full app (with history, lookups, scenarios, what-ifs, etc). And /rubber-duck to test. And the best part is that all the artifacts are in my enterprise environment. My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric. And everything is under Agent 365 IT/Sec/FinOps control! So this is not about Tokenmaxxing or vibe coding. Every step of the way the rails are engineered to create value, making everything a long-term reusable asset, with governance/security, and cost controls. This is the full system to drive business value. Disclosures: This is all pulled from public sources, and for illustrative purposes only...not financial advice! :) Here is the app and architecture..."
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> Not unexpectedly, the accompanying screenshot of a splash page for the BI app and a buzzword-laden complicated architecture diagram drew universal praise from LinkedIn fans, but also a few barbs from less-than-impressed commenters on [5]Nadella's Twitter/X post , some of whom suggested Nadella's project might even represent a [6]jump-the-shark moment for AI mania. "That he doesn't see whats wrong with saying 'My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric' is exactly why MS is failing at AI,'" replied @PassingPixels on X/Twitter. "Dude is having to run 5 different systems to emulate babies first vibe code." @zigmund_ignatov added, "Why do we call glorified slide show an app?" @Mathupiriyan quipped, "Looks like Copilot just turned a PDF into a profit crystal ball." Unimpressed, @Markusndnb remarked, "So you created a web page using tons of proprietary MS tools." And @FishyAccounting called on Nadella to show-his-work, saying "Post the prompt or it didn't happen." (btw, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declined to provide the prompt for his own self-described amazing AI DIY reporting project that he [7]touted at Microsoft's Shareholder Meeting last December).
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> So, does Nadella's self-promoted AI reworking of someone else's PDF research report strike you as an amazing example of everything that's good about AI, or does it conjure up memories of [8]The Emperor's New Clothes ?
[1] https://slashdot.org/~theodp
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2026/earnings-fy-2026-q4
[3] https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/magnificent-7-stocks
[4] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/satyanadella_some-more-detail-on-the-roic-intelligence-ugcPost-7488406958744633344-6aWm/
[5] https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2082640036949008570
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark#HeroSection
[7] https://slashdot.org/submission/17343749/the-geekwire-stories-that-defined-2025-spoiler-alert-ai-dominated
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
MBA (Score:2)
The truly amazing thing is that a guy with a MBA made something.
Re: (Score:3)
did he?
Very convincing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or rather deeply revealing where their utterly stupid AI strategy comes from. Making good software is and remains an expert game. Amateurs (like this one) need not apply. Yes, I know he has a CS degree. MS products do not reflect that and neither does this meaningless stunt.
De Clothes Of Emperor Is None He Is Having (Score:4, Informative)
Satya's been sniffing his own farts for a little too long. He created a Rube Goldberg machine that presents a near useless dashboard.
Care to tell us exactly what the investor value of that dashboard is, Satya? Let me save you from having to prompt AI. The value of that dashboard is negative at least triple digits. Negative!
The artifact isn't important (Score:2)
The artifact - the dashboard - is unimportant. He was just using an example that his intended audience would understand the value of: C-level executives who live by dashboards.
The process is what's important, and he wrapped it in Microsoft's proprietary ecosystem to bring value proposition of his platforms forward.
The process isn't new, it isn't specific or special to Microsoft, but it would resonate with his intended audience. It's a good process, and one which maps well onto other technologies.
I can trivi
He's having a CEO AI moment, it will pass. (Score:2)
But not before massive layoffs from thinking they don't need humans anymore, followed by massive hire-backs from realizing they still do.
This is the Path to CEO AI Psychosis (Score:5, Insightful)
Nadella is not showing psychosis here, but the fact that he thinks his chatbot hack of a webpage is evidence of something important show him [1]on the road to get there [techcrunch.com].
> CEOs “play with AI,” develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work.
> But these top-level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.
> In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/
Where you sit determines what you see (Score:2)
A long time ago, I worked as a small-business IT consultant. (I recovered, thanks.) A few of them were deeply frustrated application designers.
Usually they wanted an Excel spreadsheet as an application. "Just like this, except users can't mess with this part." (Readers: it was never "just like that".) I could usually build them a web version of what they kinda wanted, but what they really wanted was "their thing".
I'm pretty sure this is "Satya's thing". He made a pretty in the fashionable version of wha
uh-huh (Score:2)
> Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report, which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a "not financial advice" disclaimer).
He wouldn't have touted or even created this dashboard if the report hadn't suggest a rosy payback. The jury is still out on that prediction.
I feel bad for the PowerBI Team (Score:2)
Literally this dude has dozens, if not hundreds of people working on PowerBI for decades if you count the roots of PowerBI and he's like "look what I can do". It's a dashboard, nobody cares about your dashboards, ever. Dashboards are great for your personal use case but boring to literally every one else.
And just a few months ago he's out there claiming that it will end all software dev jobs and the best he can do with it is make a dashboard? Should have stuck to the stories about ending the world.
Holy Cow! (Score:3)
Reading that first paragraph was awful.
Presenting! (Score:5, Insightful)
The illusion of value.
Re: (Score:2)
If you can sell illusions for billions, there will always be some assholes that will do it.
Re: (Score:2)
And there's a sucker born every minute who will buy it.