Microsoft’s Big AI Gamble: Nadella Hands Over Commercial Reins to Focus on Datacenters and AI — What It Means for Customers, Partners and Competitors
A Seismic Shift in Leadership Satya Nadella’s memo announcing the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business reads like a mission statement for the AI era. Nadella describes the generational platform shift to artificial intelligence as “tectonic” and argues that Microsoft must combine sales, marketing, operations and engineering to meet customer needs and build the new AI frontier blogs.microsoft.com. The reorganisation brings marketing chief Takeshi Numoto and chief operating officer Carolina Dybeck Happe (with a dotted line to Nadella) under Althoff’s oversight. Nadella emphasised that consolidating operations within the commercial organisation will “tighten the feedback loop” between customer needs and product delivery