Over the weekend, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared a note on what he believes will define the next era of AI: organisations that “own their learning loop”.
In simple terms, his point is this: the real advantage in AI will not come from access to models alone, but from how effectively a company captures, learns from, and improves using its own experience.
For founders, this is worth paying attention to.
Skills, prompts, and agents are portable. You can switch models, replace tools, and migrate clouds. None of these compounds on its own.
What compounds is the feedback loop around your business: the traces from real work, the evaluations that measure what matters, the preferences that capture human judgement, and the outcomes tied to business results.
Every customer interaction, every workflow, every decision can make your organisation smarter — if you capture the signal.
That is why owning your learning loop matters. Not because it locks you into a platform, but because it builds institutional knowledge that outlasts any model, framework, or vendor.
Today, trace data is converging around standards like OpenTelemetry. Evaluations remain fragmented across frameworks and providers. The next piece of infrastructure we need is an open, portable standard for evals — one that works across clouds, local models, and agent frameworks, with businesses owning the data and the format.
Your learning loop is your IP. That’s the advantage that compounds.
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