You're using AI, and paying a second bill

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something in an interview last year that left more than a few readers cold. Every time you use AI and then correct it by hand, he said, that correction is itself training the vendor's model. You pay the monthly fee, and you pay a second bill with your professional judgment. He calls it "exhaust": what leaks out of you quietly in the course of everyday use. The monthly fee shows up on your statement. A modest number, once a month. But have you counted the rounds you spent teaching it to put the conclusion in the first paragraph? The edits it took to soften its stiff phrasing? Every time you say "rephrase that, it's too formal," that feel for language now lives in the vendor's model. The bigger piece hides in the setup work. To make AI genuinely useful, you first have to define things: which cases it handles, which need a person, what happens with exceptions. Those definitions are a compressed version of your last several years of work. The more seriously you adopt, the more core the material you hand over. Nadella's own answer: keep the orchestration logic and the data sovereignty in your own hands, and don't let your core workflow move into someone else's platform. A more practical first step: which of your judgment calls work on smell, the ones where something just feels off? Start by not teaching it those.