- Satya Nadella made a distinction between “knowledge workers” and “knowledge work” in a recent interview.
- The Microsoft CEO said the definition of cognitive labor will evolve as AI grows more powerful.
- He expects knowledge work to be redefined as AI becomes capable of tasks once performed exclusively by humans.
Satya Nadella isn’t dancing around it. AI agents are increasingly poised to take on work that once fell solely to human beings.
However, that doesn’t mean knowledge work is going away — he simply expects it to evolve.
“When we think about, even, all these agents, the fundamental thing is there’s a new work and workflow,” Nadella said in an interview with YouTuber Dwarkesh Patel.
“So, the new workflow for me is: I think with AI and work with my colleagues,” he added.
As tech companies continue to invest in AI, improving their models and the corresponding applications as quickly as possible, certain jobs are likely to be impacted or become obsolete.
Nadella likened the advent of AI to that of other workplace-altering technologies, using the analogy of a multinational company producing forecasts in the days before "PC, and email, and spreadsheets."
"Faxes went around," Nadella said. "Somebody then got those faxes and then did an interoffice memo that then went around, and people entered numbers, and, you know, then ultimately a forecast came, maybe just in time for the next quarter."
People were eventually able to "take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in email," and "send it around." The fax was largely replaced in the workplace, and the jobs dependent on it meaningfully changed.
"So, the entire forecasting business process changed because the work artifact and the workflow changed," Nadella added. "That is what needs to happen with AI being introduced into knowledge work."
There is no single definition of knowledge work, but it can be generally understood as labor that requires employees to think critically to solve non-routine problems.
Nadella said that the current concept of "cognitive labor" is relatively narrow and will have to expand to include new occupations and tasks. As soon as AI automates one task, he expects humans to invent another.
What we consider to be human-exclusive work today could, in the future, be the domain of a machine, Nadella said — much in the same way that the calculator knocked out the need for mental math, and "computer" once referred to someone whose job it was to manually perform calculations.
"The knowledge work of today could probably be automated," Nadella said. "Who said my life's goal is to triage my email, right? Let an AI agent triage my email. But after having triaged my email, give me a higher-level cognitive labor task of, 'Hey, these are the three drafts I really want you to review.'"
Nadella said that he expects AI agents to require a supervisor — the "knowledge worker" of the future, whether that's a human overseer or a smarter machine.
"So basically, think of it as: There is knowledge work, and there's a knowledge worker, right," Nadella said. "The knowledge work may be done by many, many agents, but you still have a knowledge worker who is dealing with all the knowledge workers. And that, I think, is the interface that one has to build."