Satya Nadella reshuffles Microsoft’s executive team so he has more time to focus on AI – News

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella is delegating some of his more mundane responsibilities to one of his top lieutenants so he has more time personally to focus on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.

In a memo to employees today, Nadella (pictured) said he’s promoting Judson Althoff (pictured below), a 12-year veteran at the company, to the newly created role of CEO of the company’s commercial business. In his new position, Althoff, who spent the last nine years leading Microsoft’s commercial sales organization, will take charge of the company’s engineering, sales, marketing, operations and finance teams, which account for more than 75% of its total revenue.

Nadella said the company’s future success is dependent on its ability to provide newer and more advanced AI capabilities to its customers. “To accelerate this, we will increasingly need to bring together sales, marketing, operations and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation,” he said.

The reshuffle is designed to consolidate the company’s efforts to build and market more business-focused products, as it strives to compete against rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC, as well as OpenAI and various other AI startups. Nadella will get to spend more time with the company’s engineering teams and ensure development heads in the direction he wants.

“This isn’t just evolution, it’s reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft,” Nadella said.

Anonymous sources who are familiar with Nadella’s motives told the Wall Street Journal that the reshuffle shouldn’t be seen as succession planning. The 58-year-old CEO is not planning to retire anytime soon, but simply desires to be more involved with efforts to build out the company’s data centers and AI technologies, the person said. As a result, Althoff is stepping up to relieve him of responsibilities such as sitting in on meetings and speaking at some events.

“This will allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work across our datacenter build-out, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation-to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift,” Nadella wrote.

Like all big technology companies, Microsoft has bet its future on the growth of AI, investing billions of dollars in capital into both developing the technology and building out the underlying compute and networking infrastructure it needs to run on.

In July, Microsoft revealed that it’s planning to spend more than $30 billion on these efforts in the first half of its current fiscal year. A good chunk of that cash will be spent on expanding the capabilities of its Copilot offerings, which infuse AI into a growing range of its products, such as Windows, Office and Teams.

Althoff (pictured, right) is an experienced man who led the creation of Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Solutions organization, which Nadella said is its “the number one seed in the industry and our company’s most important growth engine.” He joined the company in 2013 after holding senior sales positions at Oracle Corp. and EMC Corp., and was most recently serving as executive vice president and chief commercial officer, responsible for the sales strategy of its commercial businesses.

As part of the new reporting structure, Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Takeshi Numoto and the leaders of its sales and operations organizations will now report to Althoff rather than Nadella. This will help to “tighten feedback loops between what customers need and how we deliver and support them,” Nadella explained.

Photos: Microsoft