Caitlin McCabe

CEO Chief of Staff at Microsoft, mom, East coaster living in Seattle

[Caitlin McCabe @camccabe3]

Super excited to see @Alphaschool
come to the PNW! I was blown away during a visit to one of the schools, where kindergarteners were learning financial literacy and reading Growth Mindset, it really does feel like this is the future of education.

[GeekWire @geekwire]

Two-hour learning? AI-powered Alpha School lands in Seattle region https://t.co/RauXKmchiK

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

Everyone Operating At The Frontier

Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO, Microsoft, interviewed by @saranormous & @eladgil (No Priors) and @swyx (Latent Space)
Crossover special at Microsoft Build 2026.

Summary: Satya reframes Microsoft's AI strategy as an ecosystem play rather than a single model or platform, where the win is any company being able to point to AI it created and operate at the frontier with its own intelligence. Scaling laws held and intelligence still tracks the log of compute, but the value lives in deployment, where private evals become a company's biggest IP and accumulated agent traces start to look like assets on the balance sheet. Take it seriously and SaaS gets unbundled and rebundled, engineering collapses toward generalists who manage agents, and the industry has to earn community permission for the buildout by delivering benefits people can actually see.

1. Ecosystem Over Model. A platform earns its place by how much value other companies build on top of it. Satya wants any company, AI-native or traditional enterprise, to participate as a first-class participant that can point to AI it created, still using other people's models but owning a recipe of its own. He calls this the only tagline that matters for the conference: can everybody operate at the frontier with their own frontier intelligence. Without that, he says, there is no reason to hold a developer conference; you would just "worship at the altar of one model."

2. The Broken IDE. Coding agents worked so well that Microsoft now has to rebuild the IDE around them. When a developer runs a hundred agent sessions at once, the cognitive load lands back on the human and chat as the only artifact stops working, which is why the new interface needs a canvas. Even a fully agentic world still needs UI, because someone has to inspect what the agents did and decide. The lesson generalizes: every workflow handed to long-running agents will need a new surface for the human to supervise it.

3. The Harness Is The Product. The unit that matters is the harness that loops across models, data, and tools. Microsoft runs the same open GitHub harness across GitHub Copilot, security copilot, and science discovery, with progressive disclosure of tools to stay token-efficient and heavy context prep where "the magic is." The harness stays open: bring your own models, tools, and context, or swap in a Llama harness. Nadella points to M-dash finding vulnerabilities the incumbent scanner missed as proof that a multimodal harness can win in the real world.

4. Private Evals As IP. The single most valuable thing a company can own is a private eval. His acid test for control: take your private eval, run it on model A, then switch to model B; if you can still climb, you are in control, and if you cannot, you are not. Because frontier models learn from a few samples rather than mountains of data, the defensible asset is the eval you never leak. This is why Nadella reframes Microsoft's third act from operating systems to cloud to an evals-and-harness company.

5. Agents On The Balance Sheet. The traces between a company's humans and its agents become a trainable asset that belongs on the balance sheet. Human capital never made it onto the balance sheet because tacit knowledge could not be captured, but agent traces collected over time can train a "company veteran" agent that encodes how that specific enterprise creates value. As token capital and human capital both rise, the question becomes how to compound the two. Elad Gil's quip lands the point: the SEC will need accounting standards for token expertise.

6. Unbundle And Rebundle. SaaS gets taken apart and put back together, with the data model and business logic surviving the teardown. A general ledger should stay a general ledger, and a Power BI semantic model is hard-won business logic worth feeding to agents, so the work is repackaging these into new bundles and business models. Work IQ exposes what Nadella calls the most important database in a company, the M365 data that was only ever captive to email and Office apps. Now an agent can read a week of design-meeting transcripts tied to a GitHub repo and come back with a plan to change the code base, something M365 was never built to do.

7. Outcome Pricing's Catch. Per-user pricing is an artifact of buyers needing budget certainty, and it survives even as consumption pricing arrives underneath it. Subscriptions bundle some usage into per-user stacks, then consumption metering sits below, which is exactly the adjustment GitHub made after agent intensity blew past what per-seat assumed. Outcome-based pricing sounds appealing until a customer actually has an outcome and realizes they are giving away a royalty. As Nadella puts it, most people love outcomes until they have one, then they ask to go back to per-user and consumption pricing.

8. The Buy-Or-Build Test. Whether to build software or buy it reduces to a quantifiable rule: acquire it when the marginal cost of building and maintaining it yourself is higher. Maintenance is the part teams forget, because security holes that AI now finds faster also have to be fixed faster, and every fix burns tokens that someone has to own. Satya expects the current agent euphoria, where teams rebuild everything internally, to cool after one full budget cycle. The vendors that last will be the flexible ones; he sees very little tolerance ahead for any vendor that stays rigid.

9. Generalists Win. The biggest returns go to generalists whose scope just grew. LinkedIn restructured into a "full stack builder" discipline that combines design, product, and front-end while keeping each person's original edge, giving people bigger scope instead of one narrow role. Building an app now sits in the same sentence as writing a Word doc or a spreadsheet, so generalist skills suddenly carry, in Satya's words, "a higher leverage." Specialists still exist, and infrastructure science, like building the RL environment where a reward can be learned, becomes one of the hardest and most valuable roles.

10. Meta-Work. The biggest move is to make your work meta: build the agentic system that does the work instead of doing the work. Satya's example is the team running Azure's physical fiber network, who decided their job was not Azure networking but building the agentic system that does Azure networking, complete with a named agent called Miles. That team started asking for tokens instead of headcount to scale their operation. Kevin Scott's line frames why it matters: making hard things easier is one kind of progress, but true ambition is making the impossible possible, and that needs a new conceptual model of what work even is.

11. Earned Permission. The industry only gets to keep building data centers if communities feel the benefits in real ways. Satya argues the buildout has to lower energy prices through a better long-term grid, replenish water through closed-loop systems, and show up as jobs and tax base, with the burden on the industry to earn that through hard work. His read on the politics is blunt: the world will be skeptical of any tech company that says "trust us, the future will be glorious," so you have to deliver tangible benefits people can see in the next 12 to 18 months. Using a lot of energy while creating a lot of value for society has historically been a good story, and he is betting a token economy that drives productivity and broad participation lands on the right side of it.

12. A New University. The next great startup may be a new university. Satya thinks the way we educate, credential, and value those credentials has to change completely now that the means of learning and staying current have shifted so fast. Learning concepts still matters, and he points approvingly to a Stanford AI class drilling students on when to apply softmax rather than just asking a model to fix a training run. The opening he sees is for someone to build a new way of teaching that takes a person through a curriculum and out the other side into real economic opportunity, something that felt impossible for a long time.

[sarah guo @saranormous]

1/ 🔥 @NoPriorsPod x @LatentSpacePod chat with @SatyaNadella at @Microsoft Build. He has the sharpest mental models of any public company CEO I've interviewed.

$MSFT is at its heart still a tools company! Big focus on agentic coding, harness & AI evals. Takeaways:👇

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

Microsoft Build. My personal review.

For me, this was the first time I had the chance to attend Microsoft Build, at Microsoft's invitation. To be honest, I didn't really know what to expect, but I was especially looking forward to the keynote.

And it wasn't just the keynote: I also visited GitHub HQ, saw the event hall, sat in on numerous sessions, and even met Satya Nadella in person.

Holy moly. It truly exceeded all my expectations.

2026 is turning out to be a crazy year for me. It started with NVIDIA GTC in San Jose in March, followed shortly after by a trip to China - Guangzhou and Beijing - then Google I/O in California, and now Microsoft Build, also in California. What a wild ride!

I met incredible people and had fascinating conversations late into the evening about LLMs, chips, energy, geopolitical challenges, financial markets, and so much more.

What impressed me most was the pioneering spirit, the optimistic atmosphere, the enthusiasm for being at the forefront of this tech-revolution. Optimism mixed with passion and a love of building, that's what I take away from all these trips.

Microsoft was no exception. I got a behind-the-scenes look, heard exclusive GitHub sessions, experienced a personal demo of the flagship Surface Laptop Ultra, met researchers, and much more.

My honest take on Microsoft Build: Microsoft is taking feedback seriously and is trying to set things in motion and drive change on every front.
Seven new AI models - clearly not aiming for the absolute top end, but positioned in the mid-range, roughly at Sonnet level, and affordable; a new laptop with a new chip meant to rival the MacBook Pros, which, frankly, at first glance even seems capable of pulling it off; bold experiments like Project Solaris and the agentic handheld (yes, I've read all the Rabbit comparisons :D); a revamped Copilot app; the rollout of agentic features into enterprise editions with a new quantum chip; and plenty more.

It certainly wasn't boring. Time will tell what succeeds, but I'd argue Microsoft is on the right track.

[Struan Robertson @StruManchu]

Don’t sleep on this. It’s big news and completely awesome to see.

I’ll share some thoughts on Build later but there were some absolute bangers announced that I think have meaningful impact on AI first productivity.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Thanks for joining us at Build, Jensen! Grateful for the deep partnership with NVIDIA across cloud and edge.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Building a frontier intelligence ecosystem together.

Highlights from my keynote at Microsoft Build this morning.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

With the new MAI models and Frontier Tuning capabilities we announced today, we're focused on helping every company move from just consuming a frontier model to fully participating at the frontier.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Great to be back at Microsoft Build today. For us, it is not about any one piece of technology or even the platform.

It is about how we can build a frontier intelligence ecosystem together.

Sharing some of our big announcements today ...

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

A sneak peek at tomorrow's keynote...

Tune in here at 9:30am PT: https://t.co/U30neby5yv

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Just wrapped our quarterly earnings call.

We are focused on delivering AI infrastructure and solutions that empower every business to eval-max their outcomes in this agentic computing era.

Our AI business surpassed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123%.

We are at the beginning of one of the most consequential platform shifts that will change the entire tech stack as we move from end-user driven workloads to workloads driven by end-users and agents.

This will drive TAM expansion and change the value creation equation across the entire economy.

To capture this opportunity, we are executing against two major priorities:

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Super excited GPT-5.5 is rolling out to GitHub Copilot, M365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Foundry today.

With deeper reasoning, stronger multistep execution, and better performance across long, complex tasks, GPT-5.5 helps you go from idea to execution faster with fewer iterations to get to the right outcome.

It’s all about helping you choose the right model, or models, for the right task across your workflow.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

To mark the broad rollout of Agent Mode in Copilot, we had some fun recreating an iconic 90s Excel ad: same ad, smarter Excel.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

We're making a big change to the Copilot experience.

Agent Mode is generally available and now the default across Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

As models become more capable, we’re bringing that power to where real work happens, right in the canvas.

The power of a spreadsheet as an example is its spatial representation of information. What sits next to what, what feeds what. Give an agent that canvas to reason over, and a single prompt can reshape the model, the bridge, and the narrative at once.

Read more: https://t.co/73zVIFWnuI

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Great to meet with @BecaGroup in Auckland and see how they are using Azure, Foundry, and their BEYON platform to make the New Zealand Geotechnical Database more accessible and useful.

It is a powerful example of AI helping engineers access critical data faster and make better decisions, as they build more resilient infrastructure across New Zealand.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin is going live, ahead of schedule.

As the world’s most powerful AI datacenter, it will bring together hundreds of thousands of GB200s into a single seamless cluster.

Congrats to all the teams who made this possible!

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

New in Word: Copilot now tracks changes, leaves comments, and more, working more like a coworker right inside your document, grounded in all your enterprise context with Work IQ.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

New in M365 Copilot: Council.

You can run multiple models on the same prompt at the same time, so you can see where they align and diverge, and understand what each adds.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Announcing Copilot Cowork, a new way to complete tasks and get work done in M365.

When you hand off a task to Cowork, it turns your request into a plan and executes it across your apps and files, grounded in your work data and operating within M365’s security and governance boundaries.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

2/ Research a topic, turn it into a PPT, then keep iterating….