- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI must offer clear social benefits or risk losing public support.
- Nadella urged AI developers to focus on improving health, education and productivity.
- Otherwise, people will reject the energy use of AI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella worries that if artificial intelligence doesn’t start bringing real, measurable benefits to society, people will get fed up with it and its price tag, ending its current way of existence. The Davos stage is a strange place and audience to preach social good above other goods, but it certainly helped his comments stand out.
AI developers “have to get to a point where we’re using this to do something useful that changes outcomes for people, communities, countries, and industries. Otherwise, I don’t think this makes much sense,” Nadella explained during a conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
“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, educational outcomes, public sector efficiency and private sector competitiveness, across all sectors, small and large.”
The Davos crowd, accustomed to a more cheerleading role for digital transformation, seemed a little confused. But the discussion also shows how the AI hype train is both an illusion and a reality. Nadella should know what he’s talking about. Microsoft is one of the biggest drivers of the current AI boom, with tens of billions of dollars invested in OpenAI, its own Copilot suite built into productivity tools, and a seat at nearly every major AI policy table.
But his message in Davos was that leadership now demands an analysis, not just of how smart or useful AI tools are in theory, but also of whether they are helping people in schools, clinics, small businesses and municipal governments.
That is not an abstract moral argument. It is one of infrastructure. The growth of AI has been driven by immense computing power, which means it is also driven by massive use of energy. Training today’s largest models consumes as much electricity as some small countries consume in a year.
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And inference, when you run the model on your phone or desktop to answer a question or generate a response, increases that cost every second of execution. AI doesn’t just use servers; It powers a growing footprint of data centers, water-cooled systems, and network-overloading workloads.
Nadella’s social permission quote gets to the heart of what could be next. Until now, the public has widely accepted that cloud-based technology companies can use resources in exchange for productivity, entertainment or convenience. But that goodwill is not guaranteed. If AI starts to seem like a wasteful luxury, offering novelty rather than necessity, citizens and governments may begin to fight back.
AI energy value
During the session, Larry Fink asked if all this talk about productivity would mean fewer jobs, and Nadella didn’t dismiss the concern. But he argued that the potential of AI lies in amplifying what people can do.
But this moment is different from the technological inflection points of the past. The magnitude of AI’s appetite. Cloud computing grew gradually. Smartphones had physical limits. But AI can grow as fast as the models and capital behind it allow. That is why Nadella’s call to focus on results is cautious and pragmatic.
Nadella’s message was simple but forceful: We are approaching the edge of public tolerance for black-box systems powered by opaque amounts of energy, with unclear social benefits.
And maybe we should all ask ourselves harder questions when the next shiny AI tool arrives: Does this help me? Help anyone? Or are you just burning energy to generate yet another token?
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