Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, shared the following communication with Microsoft employees this morning.
We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform change, one that requires us to both control and grow our business business today while building the new border and performing flawlessly across both.
History shows that technologies for general purposes such as AI drive step changes in productivity and GDP growth, and we have a unique opportunity to help our customers and the world realize this promise.
Our success depends on enabling customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the limit of how they work. In order to speed up this, we have increasingly need to gather sales, marketing, operations and technology to create growth and strengthen our position as the chosen partner for AI transformation.
With this context, I have asked Judson Althoff to take on an expanded role as CEO of our commercial business. Over the past nine years, Judson has led our global sales organization and was the architect behind designing and building Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) to what it is today: “number one seed” in the industry and our company’s most important growth engine.
Takeshi Numoto and his marketing team will participate in this new organization, where Takeshi reports directly to Judson as CMO, while also continuing to report directly to me about all-up business models, planning, consumer marketing and business brand and communication.
Our operations organization will also move to report to Judson. By bringing operations into the commercial business, we can tighten feedback -loop between what customers need and how we deliver and support them. Carolina Dybeck Happe will continue to report to me as she works with our overall company’s transformation and continues to collaborate closely with Judson.
In addition, Judson will lead a new commercial leadership team that brings together managers from Technology, Sales, Marketing, Operations and Funding to run our product strategy and governance, GTM preparedness and sales movements with shared responsibility for the rigor and executive expertise that our customers expect.
This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser -focused on our highest ambition technical work – in accordance with our data center -building, system architecture, AI science and product innovation – to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform change. Each of us must be on our very best in terms of quickly learning new skills, adopting new ways of working and staying close to the metal to run innovation across the whole stack !!
This is not just evolution, it is reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft.
Satya