Microsoft’s Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘slop’ | TechCrunch

A few weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” its word of the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asked what to expect from AI in 2026.

In his classic, intellectual style, Nadella wrote about his personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘slop’ and start thinking of it as ‘bikes for the mind’.

He wrote: “A new concept that evolves ‘cycling for the mind’ so that we always think of AI as a scaffold for human potential rather than as a replacement.”

He continued: “We need to move beyond the arguments of sloppiness versus sophistication and develop a new balance in terms of our ‘theory of mind,’ which ensures that humans are equipped with these new cognitive enhancement tools as we interact with each other.”

If you look through those syllables, you might see that he’s not only urging everyone to stop viewing AI-generated content as sloppy, but also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a replacement for humans. He hopes the industry will instead start talking about it as a tool for people’s productivity.

Here’s the problem with that framing, though: Much of the marketing of AI agents uses the idea of ​​replacing human labor as a way to price it and justify its cost.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI are sounding the alarm that the technology will soon cause very high levels of human unemployment. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in May that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, pushing unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years. an interview on 60 minutes.

Yet we currently don’t know how true such doomsday statistics are. As Nadella implies, most AI tools today don’t replace workers, they are used by them (as long as humans don’t mind checking the AI’s work for accuracy).

An often cited study is that of MIT Project icebergwhich aims to measure the economic impact on jobs when AI enters the labor market. Project Iceberg estimates that AI can currently perform approximately 11.7% of human paid labor.

While this is widely reported as AI being able to replace almost 12% of jobs, the Project says it actually estimates that this how much of a task can be delegated to AI. It then calculates the wages associated with that transferred work. Interestingly enough, the tasks it mentions as examples include automated paperwork for nurses and AI-written computer code.

That’s not to say there aren’t jobs that are heavily impacted by AI. Corporate graphic artists and marketing bloggers are two examples, according to a so-called Substack Blood in the machine. Then there are the high unemployment rates among entry-level coders.

But it’s also true that highly skilled artists, writers and programmers produce better work with AI tools than those without the skills. AI cannot yet replace human creativity.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that, as we move into 2026, data is emerging showing that the jobs where AI has made the most progress are actually thriving. Vanguard’s 2026 Economic Forecast Report found that “the 100 or so occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases.”

The Vanguard report concludes that those who use AI masterfully make themselves more valuable and non-replaceable.

The irony is that Microsoft’s own actions last year helped create the narrative that AI is coming for our jobs. The company has been fired more than 15,000 people in 2025even as it posted record revenues and profits for its business last fiscal year, which ended in June – citing success with AI as the reason. Nadella even wrote one public memo about the layoffs after these results.

Notably, he didn’t say that internal AI efficiencies have led to budget cuts. But him said that Microsoft needed to “reimagine our mission for a new era” and name “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three business objectives in this era (the other two are security and quality).

The truth about the job losses attributed to AI by 2025 is more nuanced. As the Vanguard report points out, this had less to do with internal AI efficiency and more to do with common business practices that are less exciting for investors, such as exiting investments in slowing areas to transition to growth areas.

To be fair, Microsoft wasn’t the only one laying off employees as they pursued AI. According to research by the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the technology would be responsible for almost 55,000 layoffs in the US by 2025. CNBC reports this. That report cited major cuts last year at Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other tech companies chasing AI.

And to be fair, those of us who spend more time than necessary on social media laughing at memes and AI-generated short videos might argue that slop is also one of the most entertaining (if not best) uses of AI.