Microsoft is continuing a major leadership shakeup by creating a new combined team for its commercial and consumer Copilot products, under a new executive. The company is also moving Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman to its superintelligence team, focused on building frontier AI models.
The reorganization underscores how high the stakes have become to dominate AI in Big Tech. Microsoft is trying to solve two problems at once: turning its sprawling lineup of Copilot products into a coherent platform for both businesses and consumers, while also reducing its reliance on OpenAI by building its own frontier models.
The structural changes also reflect Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s ongoing strategy to reorganize the company to compete more aggressively in the AI race.
Microsoft’s many Copilot products have been a source of confusion for customers, and the company has been trying to address that by creating a cohesive experience across applications, according to a recent all-employee town hall viewed by Business Insider.
“This is how we move from a collection of great products to a truly integrated system, one that is simpler and more powerful for customers,” Nadella wrote in an internal email announcing the reorganization.
Jacob Andreou, whose previous title was Microsoft AI corporate vice president of product and growth, will become executive vice president of Copilot and lead the combined teams.
Microsoft recently promoted executives Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna to take over for longtime executive Rajesh Jha, who earlier this month announced his retirement. Those executives will lead Microsoft 365 apps and the Copilot platform, and make up the Copilot leadership team with Suleyman and Andreou.
Suleyman in an email to employees announcing the changes said he will now focus all of his “energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next five years.”
Suleyman formed a superintelligence team at Microsoft in November focused on training “frontier models of all scales with our own data and compute at the state-of-the-art level” to make the company “self-sufficient in AI,” he told Business Insider at the time.
Microsoft’s previous deal with OpenAI barred the software giant from developing its own AGI through 2030, according to a person familiar with the matter. A new deal announced in October allowed the companies to “independently pursue AGI (artificial general intelligence) alone or in partnership with third parties.”
Read the memos
Nadella’s memo:
I want to share two org changes we’re making to our Copilot org and superintelligence effort.
It’s clear a new era of productivity is emerging as AI experiences rapidly evolve from answering questions and suggesting code, to executing multi-step tasks with clear user control points. You see this in our announcements over the last couple of weeks, like Copilot Tasks and Copilot Cowork, agentic capabilities in Office, and Agent 365. As these experiences connect more naturally across agents, apps, and workflows, we have an opportunity to help customers spend more time on higher-value work and reduce manual coordination, while providing people with more agency and empowerment and organizations with the governance and security controls they need.
To that end, we are bringing the Copilot system across commercial and consumer together as one unified effort. This will span four connected pillars: Copilot experience, Copilot platform, Microsoft 365 apps, and AI models. This is how we move from a collection of great products to a truly integrated system, one that is simpler and more powerful for customers.
Jacob Andreou will lead the Copilot experience across consumer and commercial, driving design, product, growth, and engineering, as EVP, Copilot, reporting to me. As CVP of Product and Growth at Microsoft AI, Jacob has accelerated our user-focused AI-first product making and growth framework. Prior to that, he was SVP at Snap, where he helped scale the company from its early days.
Progress at the AI model layer is more critical than ever to our success as a company over the next decade and is foundational to everything we build above it. We are doubling down on our superintelligence mission with the talent and compute to build models that have real product impact, in terms of evals, COGS reduction, as well as advancing the frontier when it comes to meeting enterprise needs and achieving the next set of research breakthroughs. Mustafa Suleyman and I have been working towards this plan for some time, and he will continue to lead this high ambition work, reporting to me. Mustafa is uniquely qualified to drive this forward, with his deep focus and commitment to advancing the frontiers of model science, while also ensuring that human control, agency, and economic opportunity remain at the center of these advancements.
Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna will lead M365 apps and the Copilot platform. Together, Jacob, Ryan, Charles, Perry, and Mustafa make up the Copilot LT and over the next few weeks they’ll work to align the teams.
Our org boundaries will simply reflect system architecture and product shape such that we can deliver more coherent and competitive experiences that continue to evolve with model capabilities. And I am looking forward to how together we apply all of this to empower people, organizations, and the world.
Suleyman’s memo
Technology and the future of our industry will be defined by two things: frontier models, and the products through which they are experienced. For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we best tackle these huge challenges, and today I’m excited to be evolving our structure at MAI, ensuring we’re positioned to succeed in both.
I came to Microsoft with an overriding mission: to create Superintelligence that delivers a transformative, positive impact for millions of people. This requires us to build frontier models, at scale, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Everything else follows from this. It’s the foundation for our future as a company. With our ambitious, long-term frontier scale compute roadmap locked, we now have everything we need to build truly SOTA models.
As you will have just heard from Satya, the next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization to enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years. These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company. They’ll also enable us to deliver the COGS efficiencies necessary to be able to serve AI workloads at the immense scale required in the coming years. Achieving all this will be a huge challenge, and I’m committing everything we have — and I have personally — to make it happen.
To that end, I’ve been working hard with other leaders in the background for a while now to define a strategy to unify Copilot by bringing together the Consumer and Commercial efforts as one. We all know this makes sense. Every user — whether at home or at work — will be able to enjoy the full benefit of what we are all building. Today, we’re combining these organizations into a single, unified Copilot org. Jacob has demonstrated himself to be an outstanding leader for the product experience and clearly has the product instincts, the operational range, and the conviction to make Copilot a great success.
Jacob will retain a dotted line to me, and I’ll stay directly involved in much of the day-to-day operation of MAI, attending Meetups, MMMs, LT, and supporting Jacob to drive all areas of product strategy. To ensure that the models we build and the products we ship are mutually reinforcing, we are establishing a Copilot Leadership Team that includes me, Jacob, Charles Lamanna, Perry Clarke, and Ryan Roslansky. This will enable us to focus our brand strategy, our product roadmap, our models and our core infrastructure as one to deliver the best experiences possible for all our users.
Thank you for everything you’ve done over the last few years. I know how hard everyone has been pushing and the sacrifices many of you have made to help the company adapt to this new era.
We really do have an incredible opportunity to redefine Microsoft for this agentic revolution
Mustafa
