Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at an internal event on AI technology in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 30, 2024.
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microsoft is forming a new group focused on developing AI apps and providing tools to third-party customers, the company announced on Monday.
The new group will be led by Jay Parikh, former CEO of cybersecurity startup Lacework and former global head of engineering at Meta. The group will be called “Core AI – Platform and Tools,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a memo to employees, which was also published as a blog post. Its mission, he said, is to “build an end-to-end Copilot and AI stack so that both our own and third-party customers can build and run AI apps and agents.”
The announcement comes 10 months after Microsoft hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its Copilot AI initiative. In that role, Mr. Suleiman is Executive Vice President and reports to Mr. Nadella.
Nadella said in a Monday post that Parikh will work closely with Suleiman, cloud chief Scott Guthrie, technology chief Kevin Scott and other top technology leaders at the company. Mr. Parikh joined Microsoft in October as executive vice president, reporting directly to the CEO.
Artificial intelligence has been a major theme in the technology industry since OpenAI announced ChatGPT in late 2022, and Microsoft has been at the center of the boom as a major investor in OpenAI. Microsoft relies on OpenAI’s large-scale language models for use in its internal AI for areas such as content generation and code writing, and also serves as the startup’s primary cloud partner.
At the same time, Microsoft is developing products and tools that compete with some OpenAI services. Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in an SEC filing, but Nadella said in a podcast last month when discussing his relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley: He used the phrase “tension of cooperation.”
“Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries mean nothing to our customers or competitors,” Nadella said in a memo Monday.
Nadella said the new group will bring together developers and people working on AI platforms, as well as teams from the CTO’s office.
“Our success in this next phase will depend on having the best AI platforms, tools, and infrastructure in place,” he wrote.
Mr. Parikh joined Microsoft from Lacework. Lacework is a fast-growing and high-profile startup whose valuation soared to $8.3 billion in 2022, seven years after its founding. But the company’s fortunes changed as the market turned risk-averse, and Lacework was forced to make significant job cuts in an effort to increase profits. In August, security software vendors fortinet Completed acquisition of Lacework for $149 million.
—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
