‘This Is The Time’: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Talks Software’s Role In Covid-19 Response

As the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, one that works with hundreds of millions of customers and employs more than 150,000 people, Satya Nadella has a unique vantage point for observing technology’s role in combatting Covid-19.

The Microsoft chief says he is seeing a migration to newer cloud technology in local governments, schools and hospitals that is in some cases skipping multiple generations of tech.

“That’s just a leap,” says Nadella. “We’ve talked about these things for decades, but this is the time where we are doing it at scale. And so the question is, what are we learning? What does it show which is sustainable? What should we re-imagine when we get back to ‘normal?”

Nadella points to a health bot developed by Microsoft he says is used by hundreds of hospitals today for coronavirus triage. The bot asks questions of potential patients as a first round of screening, a virtual doctor via telemedicine, and ultimately to a testing solution. “Now that it’s built, I’m sure it’ll get used even in a normal [situation],” Nadella says. “ I think these are workflows that are going to be relevant much beyond Covid-19 as well.”

These comments were part of an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with the leader of the massive $1.4 trillion (market cap) global tech company ahead of Microsoft’s Build developer conference that began on Tuesday. Like other events, Build is happening remotely this year; Nadella spoke to Forbes over Teams, his company’s own rival tool to Zoom.

In tune with the moment, Build’s focus in 2020 is on how software makers and coders are building tools to combat and keep businesses running in the face of Covid-19 and in its eventual wake. “In a world where software is going to shape pretty much every industry, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s retail, whether it’s education, public sector, then the most important thing is, let’s make software developers very productive,” Nadella says.