Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Computer Science students: All of us are going to be more ...

Microsoft

CEO Satya Nadella has shared an advice for aspiring tech professionals. The CEO recently appeared in a conversation with tech YouTuber

Sajjaad Khade

where he urged students to focus on building strong fundamentals in

computational thinking

, even as AI shapes the software industry. He stressed that despite AI’s growing role in coding, the ability to break down problems logically and design systematic solutions remains essential. However, he warned that even with AI, success still depends on giving clear, structured instructions—a skill that blends technical knowledge with systems thinking.“The path to being that software architect gets speeded up,” Nadella said, adding that soon, “All of us are going to be more software architects.”

Getting fundamentals of software is important: Satyla Nadella

During the conversation, Khade asked Nadella: “In this world of AI, if I'm a beginner, just want to break into tech, what's your number one piece of advice?”

Nadella replied saying: “Just getting real fundamentals of software (if you're a software engineer), I think matters a lot.” Adding further, he said “To me, having the ability to think computationally (is important).”Nadella explained using his own example saying he was able to fix a bug by just assigning it to the CoPilot coding agent. “Except I was thinking about it, it was a pretty cool issue, right? The issue was I did a filter, which was basically a percentile.. Creating a feature. But then I said, "Oh man, this is, like, you know, I could, you know, recount what is a SQL, right?”

When Satya Nadella revealed that up to 30% of Microsoft’s code is now written by AI

During a conversation with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that AI now writes up to 30% of Microsoft’s code base.“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella then said.