Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sparked debate around enterprise artificial intelligence, arguing that businesses are paying a far higher price for AI than they realise. According to Nadella, organisations are not only spending money on AI tools but are also handing over valuable internal knowledge that helps those systems become more effective. Sharing his views in a detailed post on X, as reported by The New Stack, Nadella described the issue as a “reverse information paradox.” He writes, “You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful.” Nadella argued that the more organisations rely on AI, the more internal know-how becomes embedded within those systems. He also highlighted what he calls AI “exhaust”: the trail of information generated through everyday interactions with enterprise AI systems, noting that “every correction is distilled into institutional know-how” and that this knowledge “leaks almost imperceptibly: trace by trace, correction by correction, eval by eval.” Nadella suggested this accumulated expertise could eventually become more valuable than the original documents and data used to train the system.