— Karthik Ramakrishnan, who spent the past 14 years at Amazon where he helped develop the company’s AI strategy, has taken a VP role within the Data Cloud organization at Google Cloud.
“We are entering the ‘Agentic Era,’ and my focus is helping this world-class team build the autonomous data platform of the future,” Ramakrishnan wrote on LinkedIn. “I can’t wait to dive back into the ‘hard things’ and see what we can build together next.”
Ramakrishnan helped launch Amazon Alexa and develop the Amazon Nova foundation models. “My work at Amazon spanned the full evolution from conversational AI to multi-modal AGI,” he notes on his LinkedIn profile. Before joining Amazon in 2012, Ramakrishnan spent three years at Microsoft following the company’s acquisition of Tellme Networks, where he was a senior platform engineer.
Ramakrishnan’s move to Google comes amid a shake-up within Amazon’s AI unit — including the recent departure of Rohit Prasad, the executive who led Amazon’s AI initiatives and overseen the creation of its homegrown Nova AI models.
In a memo sent Dec. 17, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy named Peter DeSantis, a 27-year company veteran and top cloud infrastructure executive, to lead a new organization that combines its Nova and model research teams with custom silicon and quantum computing.
Amazon last month unveiled its Nova 2 models at its annual re:Invent conference. The company is attempting to close the gap with AI rivals including OpenAI and Google in the race to develop increasingly capable AI systems.
— C.J. Mahoney, a corporate vice president and top legal executive at Microsoft, joined Meta as its new chief legal officer. Axios first reported the move.
Mahoney spent the past five years at Microsoft, first as a deputy general counsel focused on international trade and Azure, then later as a corporate vice president and general counsel for product, services, and go-to-market legal. He previously was a deputy U.S. trade representative from 2018 to 2020 during President Trump’s first term.
Mahoney replaces Jennifer Newstead, who departed for the general counsel role at Apple.
Microsoft promoted longtime exec Jonathan Palmer to chief legal officer in September, following the departure of Hossein Nowbar, who is at ServiceNow as president and chief legal officer.
