A couple of weeks after Merriam-Webster named “slop” as its word of the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in on what to expect from AI in 2026.
In his classic, intellectual style, Nadella wrote on his personal blog that he wants us to stop thinking of AI as “slop” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.”
He wrote, “A new concept that evolves ‘bicycles for the mind’ such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute.”
He continued: “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.”
If you parse through those syllables, you may see that he’s not only urging everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as slop, but also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a 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, though: Much of AI agent marketing uses the idea of replacing human labor as a way to price it, and justify its expense.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in AI have been sounding the alarm that the tech will soon cause very high levels of human unemployment. For instance, in May Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could take away half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, raising unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years, and he doubled down on that last month in an interview on 60 Minutes.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
Yet we currently don’t know how true such doomsday stats are. As Nadella implies, most AI tools today don’t replace workers, they are used by them (as long as the human doesn’t mind checking the AI’s work for accuracy).
One oft-cited research study is MIT’s ongoing Project Iceberg, which seeks to measure the economic impact on jobs as AI enters the workforce. Project Iceberg estimates that AI is currently capable of performing about 11.7% of human paid labor.
While this has been widely reported as AI being capable of replacing nearly 12% of jobs, the Project says what it’s actually estimating is how much of a job can be offloaded to AI. It then calculates wages attached to that offloaded work. Interestingly, the tasks it cites as examples include automated paperwork for nurses and AI-written computer code.
That’s not to say there are no jobs being heavily impacted by AI. Corporate graphic artists and marketing bloggers are two examples, according to a Substack called Blood in the Machine. Then there are the high unemployment rates 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 without the skills. AI can’t replace human creativity, yet.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that as we slide into 2026, some data is emerging that shows the jobs where AI has made the most progress are actually flourishing. Vanguard’s 2026 economic forecast report found that “the approximately 100 occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases.”
The Vanguard report concludes that those who are masterfully using AI are making themselves more valuable, not replaceable.
The irony is that Microsoft’s own actions last year helped give rise to the AI-is-coming-for-our-jobs narrative. The company laid off over 15,000 people in 2025, even as it recorded record revenues and profits for its last fiscal year, which closed in June — citing success with AI as a reason. Nadella even wrote a public memo about the layoffs after these results.
Notably, he didn’t say that internal AI efficiency led to cuts. But he did say that Microsoft had to “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 job loss attributed to AI during 2025 is more nuanced. As the Vanguard report points out, this had less to do with internal AI efficiency and more to do with ordinary business practices that are less exciting to investors, like ending investment in slowing areas to pile in to growing ones.
To be fair, Microsoft wasn’t alone in laying off workers while pursuing AI. The technology was said to be responsible for almost 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025, according to research from firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, CNBC reported. That report cited the large cuts last year at Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, and other tech companies chasing AI.
And to be fair to slop, those of us who spend more time than we should on social media laughing at memes and AI-generated short-form videos might argue that slop is one of AI’s most entertaining (if not best) uses, too.
