Nadella predicts private evals and implementation economy

Satya Nadella describes the future of the firm as accumulating 'local intelligence' to avoid the 'reverse information paradox,' where value leaks to model providers. He predicts every firm will develop private evaluation benchmarks as core intellectual property, which models will use to hill-climb. He cites Unilever as an example of an agentic system for order-to-cash automation that started with a frontier model but substituted a lower-cost MAI model for trade claims, allowing the IT team to manage it after initial support. Nadella notes that AI adoption in sectors like healthcare, specifically the NHS, and software development, where Factory is winning despite being fifth in market share, is driving GDP growth. He anticipates a new 'implementation economy' combining business and technical consulting, distinct from traditional systems integration, to help firms transition to AI-native operations. Nadella argues that firms must retain the surplus value created by AI use through private knowledge and evals, and that a new hybrid consulting sector will emerge to facilitate this transition.