Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft, has some key advice for aspiring tech professionals: to strengthen their computational thinking fundamentals.

He offered this piece of advice in a recent interview with tech YouTuber Sajjad Khade, and encouraged tech aspirants to work on their basics even as Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to alter the software industry dramatically, The Times of India reports.

Despite AI's rising involvement in coding, Nadella maintained that the ability to break down problems rationally and devise systematic solutions is still critical.

“Just getting real fundamentals of software (if you're a software engineer), I think matters a lot,” he said, adding, “To me, having the ability to think computationally (is important).”

However, he cautioned that even with AI, success is dependent on providing clear, structured instructions — a talent that combines technical understanding with systems thinking.

In a conversation with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, Nadella disclosed 30 per cent of all of Microsoft's code is currently written by AI.

“I’d say maybe 20 per cent, 30 per cent of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella then said.

Acknowledging this in Khade’s interview, he stated that he was able to revisit software concepts by fixing issues by himself, rather than assigning them to CoPilot (Microsoft’s Learning Language Model). “This is, like, you know, I could, recount what is a SQL, right?” he said.