 "Satya Nadella is in founder mode’: Microsoft rejigs leadership to take on rivals in AI market")
Satya Nadella has spent the past year remoulding Microsoft’s top leadership as the company seeks to maintain momentum in artificial intelligence at a time of intensifying competition and strategic change. The moves come as the 50-year-old software group recalibrates its long-standing relationship with OpenAI while pushing to accelerate development of its own AI capabilities.
Leadership shake-up to drive AI execution
The Microsoft chief executive has made several high-profile appointments and promotions, including the hiring of former Meta engineering head Jay Parikh and the elevation of senior executives such as commercial chief Judson Althoff and LinkedIn chief executive Ryan Roslansky, whose platform is owned by Microsoft.
According to more than half a dozen current and former Microsoft executives, the changes reflect Nadella’s determination to move faster in building proprietary AI models, strengthen coding tools and improve AI-powered applications, as rivals close the gap.
“Satya is in ‘founder mode’,” said Dee Templeton, Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer, using a term popularised by Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham to describe a more hands-on leadership approach.
People close to Nadella say he is also focused on rising competition from Amazon and Google, both of which were once viewed as lagging in AI but have since made significant advances in infrastructure and model development.
Microsoft secured an early lead through its $14bn investment in OpenAI, which provided privileged access to the ChatGPT maker’s technology and priority use of its data centre capacity. However, after restructuring its partnership with Sam Altman’s start-up in October, Microsoft relinquished exclusivity over OpenAI’s data centre requirements and is set to lose exclusive access to its research and models in the early 2030s.
Rivals close in as AI market heats up
While Microsoft continues to scale its own products, challenges remain. The company disclosed in October that Copilot, the AI assistant embedded in Microsoft 365, had surpassed 150mn monthly active users. That figure still trails the roughly 650mn users reported by Google for its Gemini chatbot and the 800mn users claimed by OpenAI for ChatGPT.
Pressure is also coming from smaller rivals. Start-ups including Anthropic, Anysphere and Replit are increasingly encroaching on Microsoft’s share of the fast-growing market for AI-powered coding tools, adding to the urgency behind Nadella’s leadership overhaul.
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