Moments ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned a company memo detailing a reorg within the company that puts its artificial intelligence investments at its forefront and realigns its vision for its search and browsing future.
According to the memo on the Official Microsoft Blog, Nadella warmly invites DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman and Inflection co-founder Karen Simonyan to the company with the task of heading up a new business organization within the company dubbed Microsoft AI.
Mustafa will act as EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI while Karen represents chief scientist and while reporting directly to Mustafa, she will also oversee several other AI researchers, engineers, and developers she has brought over from Inflection team.
The founding and staffing of Microsoft AI are only half of what Nadella shared today in his memo, the other half included the realignment of Copilot, Bing, and Edge as structured departments that now all fall under the newly formed business.
Soon, CEO of advertising and web services at Microsoft Mikhail Parakhin will report to Mustafa as well as principal researcher Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team.
Aligning Bing, Copilot, and Edge under the new AI business makes sense and is probably indicative of where customers will soon have more AI features surface. For now, Nadella has stated that Kevin Scott will continue his role as CTO and EVP of AI, but he does not make clear who Scott directly reports to under the new business structure.
However, Nadella does admit that he leaned heavily on Scott to help with the transition, implying the two are at least in direct communication often. Rajesh Jha will continue as EVP of Experiences and Devices and is expected to collaborate with Mustafa according to Nadella.
As for other businesses that are shaded by the umbrella of Microsoft’s newish AI focus such as Windows or Office 365, Nadella states “there are no other changes to the senior leadership teams or other organizations.”
If it wasn’t clear before today, Microsoft is fully committed to making AI and its own Copilot a viable solution for millions of users going forward unlike some of their other projects such as the Metaverse (2022), Zune 2011, HoloLens (2023), and Windows Phone (2017)
