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

A couple of weeks after Merriam-Webster was named “slop” is the word of the yearMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella considers what to expect from AI in 2026.

In a classic, intellectual style, Nadella wrote in personal blog he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “slop” and start thinking of it as a “bicycle for the mind.”

He wrote, “The emerging new concept of ‘bicycles for the mind’ keeps us thinking of AI as scaffolding for human potential vs surrogate.”

He continued: “We need to move beyond the slop vs sophistication argument and develop a new balance of our ‘theory of mind’ which states that humans are equipped with these new cognitive enhancement tools when we are in relationships.

If you decipher the syllables, you can see that he’s not only asking everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as slop, but also wanting the tech industry to stop talking about AI as replacement for humans. He hopes the industry will start talking about it as a human-helper productivity tool instead.

Here’s the problem with that framing: Many AI marketing agents use ideas replacing human labor as a way to price, and justify costs.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI have sounded the alarm that the technology will lead to extremely high levels of human unemployment. For example, in May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobsincrease unemployment to 10-20% in the next five years, and they doubled last month in interview on 60 Minutes.

But now we don’t know the truth of those doomsday statistics. As Nadella said, most of today’s AI tools do not replace workers, but are used by them (as long as humans do not think. check AI work for accuracy).

One of the most frequently cited research studies is MIT’s ongoing work Project Icebergwhich seeks to measure the economic impact on employment as AI enters the workforce. Project Iceberg estimates that AI can now perform about 11.7% of human labor.

While this has been widely reported as AI could replace nearly 12% of jobs, the Project says this is an estimate how many jobs can be offloaded to AI. Then calculate the wages associated with the unloaded work. It’s good, the the task mentioned is an example including automated paperwork for nurses and AI-written computer code.

This is not to say that there are no jobs affected by AI. Corporate graphic artists and marketing bloggers are two examples, according to Substack Blood in the Machine. Then there is a high unemployment rate among new grad junior coders.

But it’s also true that highly skilled artists, writers and programmers produce better work with AI tools than those with less skill. AI has yet to replace human creativity.

So, it may come as no surprise that as we move into 2026, some data is emerging that shows the jobs where AI has made the most progress are actually evolving. Vanguard’s 2026 economic forecast report found that “the roughly 100 jobs experiencing the most AI automation actually outperformed the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases.”

The Vanguard report concluded that those who use AI well make themselves more valuable, irreplaceable.

The irony is that Microsoft’s own actions last year helped fuel the AI-is-coming-for-our-jobs narrative. Company layoffs more than 15,000 people in 2025even as a record of profits and profits for its last fiscal year, which closed in June – citing success with AI as a reason. Nadella even wrote a general memo regarding layoffs after these results.

Notably, they didn’t say internal AI efficiencies caused the cuts. But he is have said that Microsoft should “reimagine our mission for a new era” and named “AI transformation” as one of the company’s three business objectives in this era (the other two being security and quality).

The truth about AI-induced job losses in 2025 AI is more. As the Vanguard report points out, this has nothing to do with internal AI efficiency and more to do with ordinary business practices that are less appealing to investors, such as stopping investment in areas that are slow to grow.

To be fair, Microsoft isn’t just laying off employees when it comes to AI. Technology is said to be responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the US by 2025, according to research from the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, CNBC reported. The report cited big cuts last year at Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and other tech companies pursuing AI.

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