Nadella Says Private Evals May Become Companies' Most Valuable IP

What was said

"I think about it, like what's that private eval that you can then use even a frontier model to hill climb on and not leak the traces, maybe one of the biggest drivers of IP. In fact, there may be— like human capital was never possible to go put on a balance sheet. Whereas now I think you can with the agents that have learned through the traces."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued that proprietary evaluation systems for AI models could become the most important intellectual property companies possess, potentially valuable enough to appear on balance sheets. He contended that capturing institutional knowledge through agent traces creates quantifiable assets where human tacit knowledge previously could not be accounted for, fundamentally changing how corporate value is measured.