I showed Microsoft’s CEO my AI family butler. He wanted it in his keynote.

I sat down with Satya Nadella in Sydney for an exclusive interview, and I brought a demo. More on that in a moment. First, the big news.

Microsoft has just announced A$25 billion in investment in Australia, By the end of 2029, that money goes into Azure AI supercomputing and cloud infrastructure right here in Australia.

This isn’t vague “we believe in Australia” corporate talk. There’s a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian Government, an expanded cybersecurity partnership with the Australian Signals Directorate, and a commitment to train three million Australians with AI skills by 2028.

My chat with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

I started by asking Nadella whether this moment for Microsoft feels like the leap from MS-DOS to Windows, a complete transformation of what the company is. His answer was revealing.

“The core thread line for me is how have we enabled others to build more ambitious things than anything that we have built,” he said. “That I think is the defining line of Microsoft.”

On jobs, the question I get asked more than any other when I talk about AI publicly,Nadella didn’t dodge it. “The state of AI, and quite frankly even for the foreseeable future, is more about what I’ll call task level automation inside of jobs,” he said. He talked about an Australian medical startup whose scribe tool is cutting doctors’ paperwork and giving them more time with patients. That’s the model, AI handles the admin, humans do the work that matters.

He was equally direct about the Australian government’s approach: “Australia is taking a really progressive approach to making sure they’re thinking about what is the positives of AI, what are some of the things they need to get ahead on, whether it’s safety or whether it’s around skills.”

The bit where I showed the boss of Microsoft my family calendar app

Here’s where it got fun for me personally. I built a Copilot Studio agent called Charles – our Family Butler. I hooked it up to my Outlook calendar and our shared family calendar, and showed it to Nadella live.

I asked Charles what my schedule looked like on Monday. It didn’t just list appointments, it identified clashes, flagged issues, and asked if I wanted it to send my wife Amanda a note about the netball pickup conflict. Then I asked it to move a planning meeting and let my wife know I could pick up Victoria from netball. It rescheduled the meeting and sent the email. Done.

Nadella’s reaction: “I wish you had gotten into my keynote and demoed that, because I think what you just showed is the pride you have, the sense of empowerment you have that you built this application. Just like in the past you may have built an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document, you literally created a piece of software.”

He summed up the shift well: “We used to have this thing called information at your fingertips and now going forward it’s about agents at your fingertips that are really helping you be more productive.”

Cricket, cybersecurity and the future

Nadella had also spent time with Cricket Australia, who are using Microsoft Copilot to pull real-time stats during matches from data going back to 1897. As a cricket tragic himself, yes, there’s a cricket pitch at Microsoft HQ in Seattle,he was visibly enthused. “That ability to generate the most interesting stat relevant to the context of one ball, that’s just extraordinary.”

I asked him what the next three to four years looks like. His answer was more grounded than I expected. “The speed with which some of these new capability jumps are happening are pretty stunning. But the more important aspect is the capabilities are there. The question now is to be able to harness them.” He said he was more impressed by my family calendar demo than any model benchmark. That says a lot about where we’re heading.

On the concern about fake content and deepfakes, he acknowledged it directly. “Provenance and trust are going to be the most important aspects it’s not just about deepfakes, but everything.” Though he didn’t really have a direct answer to the problem itself. One for consideration long term for sure.

The numbers that matter

• A$25 billion in infrastructure investment by end of 2029
• Three million Australians to be trained with AI skills by 2028
• 38,000+ government accounts already secured under the Microsoft-ASD Cyber Shield
• 35 previously unknown vulnerabilities identified since the program launched in 2023
• Microsoft becomes a founding partner of the Australian AI Safety Institute

The previous skilling target was one million people across Australia and New Zealand. They hit that early. Three million by 2028 is a serious escalation.

Nadella wrapped it up with a line that stuck with me: “AI is more an accelerant to the comparative advantage of countries and companies that already have that going. Australia today is a powerhouse on many fronts, and those fronts will get more amplified because of their use of AI.”