Build 2026 podcast with Satya Nadella, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil from No Priors, and Swyx | LIVE100
Microsoft frames Build 2026 as an AI ecosystem play, not a single model or platform, anchored by its MAI models.
“let's sort of conceptualize this more as an ecosystem play as opposed to a single model or even a single platform”— Satya Nadella
At Build 2026, Satya Nadella reframed Microsoft's AI strategy as an ecosystem play where any company can be a first-class participant building AI it owns, rather than a single-model or single-platform approach. He emphasized the new MAI models' clean pre-training lineage and data quality as a differentiator from open-weight models that benchmark well but underperform in practice. This signals a strategic positioning shift that matters for how enterprises and AI-native companies build on Microsoft's stack.