Microsoft's Jeff Teper: AI progress is unlike anything in his 35 years at the company

donasarkar · x · 2026-10-29

At #PPCC26, donasarkar recapped a fireside chat between Heda Maven and Microsoft's Jeff Teper (35 years at Microsoft, once hired Satya Nadella):

AI is accelerating hockey-stick style: from failing to generate a good image to one-shotting complex PPTs within a year; Microsoft constantly rewrites products on models far better than three months ago — Teper has never seen anything like it
The ROI debate will fade: like the old "what's the ROI of giving everyone a PC?" question, it disappears as everyone becomes AI-native; costs will drop like PCs did
Playbook for companies: diffuse the tech, let people find problems, disrupt processes that need it, and govern high-usage areas for scale
Costs are a choice: pick your FinOps plan; all model companies are driving costs down; governance must catch cost/usage spikes in real time (e.g. Agent365)
Process design is changing: some flows fit a 5-step Power Automate on CPU, others an LLM on GPU — now you co-design processes by iterating with an LLM

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