A Positive-Sum Future
I’ve been thinking a lot about what the net benefit of the AI platform wave is. The real question is how to empower every company out there to get more out of this platform shift and build their own AI native capabilities and enterprise value (vs inadvertently just transfer their unique value to the tech sector!!).
Bill famously said a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. That’s the essence of the positive-sum future.
Even in our somewhat zero-sum mindset industry, we can create partnerships that create value for all parties involved. Our partnership with OpenAI is a great example. Our investment helped them scale; their research accelerated our own innovation. That’s what healthy platforms and partners do—they catalyze and compound progress.
There’s no better proof than what we announced just this week. The world’s first AI superfactory was co-designed with OpenAI and informed by three generations of AI supercomputers we built for frontier model training and inference. It was also a result of working closely with Nvidia and getting better at the full stack optimization from model architecture to micro-architecture of the chip and everything between three companies!
We also did the work to bring AMD into the fleet doing inference of GPT models, which enabled them to get up to speed on their own software stack for AI.
And now all this infrastructure will scale to support every startup to enterprise doing their own training to inference.
You can see the same dynamic in coding. Thanks to AI, the category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don’t ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.
Of course, the real test of this era won’t be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights.
When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure. That’s when we’ll know the system is working.
Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.
We know that the Internet wave had tremendous positive sum impact in the world, and yet we also had some sectors that got hollowed out like local media. This time around we have the opportunity to ensure broad diffusion of this tech with choice and control that is distributed to ensure positive sum outcomes across the board.
At the end of the day, this new technological wave gives us the opportunity to dream bigger and set higher ambitions for what we can collectively achieve. Each of us will need to play our part!
I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff's point of view. The true value of AI should not lie in what it "replaces," but in what it "enhances." When we view technology as an extension of human capabilities rather than a replacement, we are upholding individual dignity. Tech giants bear the responsibility not only of driving GDP growth, but also of ensuring that this technological dividend translates into the confidence of every ordinary person in navigating a complex world, rather than merely becoming "components" in the operation of corporations
Chief Executive Officer, PT Momentum Teknodata Semesta
3wSatya Nadella It shifts right around the moment the first internal model starts outperforming the vendor baseline, even slightly. That’s usually when the conversation stops being about capability and starts getting quieter, almost guarded. Not because the platform isn’t working, but because the dependency becomes harder to measure than the output. The framing of positive-sum holds, but only up to the point where one side can still see where its own edge is being formed. After that, value still grows, just not always where people expect it to accumulate. You can feel it in smaller teams first. The ones that build just enough to stay close to the infrastructure, but not enough to fully detach from it. They move fast, ship quickly, look AI-native from the outside. But underneath, there’s a subtle drift. Ownership of direction starts to blur. And then it becomes a question no one really puts on the slide. Not whether the system is creating more value, but whether the firm still knows how its own value is being created… or if it’s just participating in someone else’s curve. That part tends to show up later.
Morii
**CÓDIGO DEMO MUNDIAL - TESTE 30s:** ```python def decision_tech(d): s=min(max(len(d)*1.2+25-(d.lower().count('risco')*10),30),95) r=round(100-s,0) if r>75: a='❌ CANCELAR' elif r>50: a='⏸️ REVISAR' else: a='✅ PROTEGIDO' return f"{round(s)}/100 | {r}% | {a}" # TESTES GLOBAIS: print(decision_tech("Aprovar lançamento?")) print(decision_tech("Empréstimo R$2M validado?")) print(decision_tech("Dinheiro pro João?"))
I agree, companies must embed AI into core processes, not just bolt it on, and strong governance plus targeted upskilling will determine who truly captures the value.