According to Fortune, Liz Danzico, the Vice-President of Design at Microsoft AI, announced at the Fortune Brainstorm Design conference in Macau that her division has a clear internal goal: every person in the studio must become “AI-native” by the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year, which concludes in June. The Microsoft AI lab, which is just over a year old and led by CEO Mustafa Suleyman, oversees consumer AI products like the Copilot chatbot. To achieve this, Danzico helped create an in-house AI course for the division’s 8,000 to 9,000 employees. She says the response has been “tremendously positive,” with staff feeling more satisfied and less anxious after experimenting with various AI tools. Furthermore, Microsoft AI is working with the AFL-CIO labor federation to educate union workers on AI, aiming to give them a voice in how the technology is integrated into their workplaces.
What “AI-Native” Really Means
So, what does “AI-native” even mean for a designer or a program manager at Microsoft? It’s not just about knowing how to prompt Copilot. Danzico’s comments point to a deeper cultural shift. It’s about leaning into uncertainty, embracing creativity in new ways, and having the psychological safety to voice diverse ideas in a rapidly changing field. Basically, they want their people to think with AI, not just about it. The fact that they feel the need for a formal, division-wide course is telling. It admits that even in the team building these tools, expertise isn’t universal. That’s a pretty honest assessment for a tech giant.
The Bigger Picture: Empowerment and Labor
Here’s the thing that stands out to me: the parallel push with the AFL-CIO. On one hand, you’re upskilling your own tech employees to be AI power users. On the other, you’re proactively engaging with labor unions to “democratize” AI’s impact. That’s a savvy, two-pronged approach to managing the technology’s disruptive potential. Microsoft is trying to build a narrative that it’s a responsible steward, ensuring workers—both its own and those in other industries—are “informed” and have a “say.” Whether this genuinely shifts power dynamics or just makes adoption smoother for management is the billion-dollar question. But it’s a more concerted effort on labor relations than we typically see from Silicon Valley.
The Real Deadline Pressure
Now, let’s talk about that deadline: the end of the fiscal year. That’s basically June. That’s not much time to transform thousands of employees. This screams internal pressure to fully leverage their massive investment in OpenAI and integrate AI into every fiber of their product development. You don’t set a company-wide, fiscal-year deadline for a “nice-to-have” cultural initiative. This is a business imperative. They need their entire workforce operating at a new level of efficiency and innovation, pronto. The gamble is that forcing this immersion will accelerate their products’ evolution faster than the competition. I think we’ll see if it leads to breakthrough Copilot features or just a lot of rushed, AI-checkbox meetings.
