Microsoft Makes Data the Real Moat (But… wasn’t it always?)
Satya Nadella just said it out loud: “AI models are becoming commodity. Data is one of the most strategic assets.”
Fair. But let’s be honest. Data was always the moat. Everyone knew it. The industry just got distracted for two years chasing model-size flexing instead of fixing the boring fundamentals.
What’s changed now isn’t the insight, it’s the urgency.
Microsoft’s push toward “context engineering” and Work IQ is basically an admission that the competitive edge won’t come from bigger models. It will come from how clean, structured and context rich your data is when it hits the model.
The model arms race is flattening.
The data engineering race is just starting.
You can have a god-tier model, but if your organisation’s data is scattered, stale or unusable, you’re still bottlenecked. That’s always been true. The difference now is that even the giants are finally saying it in public.
