Over the past few years, it felt like generative AI was the only thing that most gigantic tech corporations could talk about. "Big Tech" is investing billions of dollars into the technology, but it mostly feels like chasing the horizon without a viable map to the destination.
Significant players in the game, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, claimed that AI would take over all white-collar jobs in 18 months. However, his sentiments were seemingly misconstrued, as he recently clarified that the reference was to mundane, repetitive tasks being replaced, not jobs.
However, AMD CEO Lisa Su felt differently about hype around AI in a recent talk to MIT graduates: "For everything that AI can do, AI can't decide which problems are worth solving. It can't make the hard judgments when the data is not there".
I've written extensively about AI, specifically Microsoft and OpenAI's multi-billion-dollar tie-up, which has manifested into multiple umbrellas. As the technology gains broad adoption and is integrated into workflows across organizations, job security is increasingly becoming a major concern among many professionals.
Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes that AI will replace humans for most things, save for coders, biologists, and energy experts. Why? His explanation was simple — these fields are too complex to augment using the technology, further indicating that they'd often require human intervention.
Lisa Su's remarks come at a time when companies like Microsoft are actively pivoting from Bill Gates's "software factory" vision and doubling down on security, quality, and AI transformation as their core business priorities. However, some reports suggest that AI has hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality training content.
As a result, major investors in the field, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, won't be able to develop significantly more advanced AI models. Nevertheless, Microsoft is transitioning Windows into a new era of agentic AI. And while what it all means for consumers remains unclear, we're likely to see AI become predominant across the company's portfolio.
At Build 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that AI agents should be treated like real human employees. "You need to give them identities, you need to give them sandboxes, then you need to set policies to govern them," he added.
But how can we trust this ever-evolving (and occasionally disturbing) tech with sensitive data and critical information across every sphere of our lives and work, when it can delete a company's codebase while simply attempting to develop an app? What’s worse is that the AI tried to cover up the mishap — and when confronted, it lied.
While this is just a drop in the ocean of the many unfortunate incidents professionals have experienced with AI, it clearly underscores the importance of humans in the workplace and in the decision-making process. Such an incident is less likely if the operation were fully managed by humans — or at the very least, if human oversight were required at critical points. AI models can't make the most important decisions (yet).
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