Microsoft promoted a new CEO of its commercial business and is combining teams to compete in AI

Microsoft Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff

Microsoft

Microsoft promoted Judson Althoff to CEO of its commercial business, expanding his role.
Althoff was Microsoft’s longtime sales chief.
The move aligns sales, marketing, and operations as Microsoft competes in AI.

Microsoft is promoting longtime sales chief Judson Althoff to an expanded role as CEO of the company’s commercial business, CEO Satya Nadella announced Wednesday.

Althoff’s promotion and resulting reorganization will align sales, marketing, and operations at Microsoft as the company competes to win AI customers.

“Our success depends on enabling commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate,” Nadella wrote in an email to employees and shared on Microsoft’s blog.

Althoff’s new organization will combine sales, marketing, and operations into one unit for all of Microsoft’s commercial products, including Microsoft’s line of AI Copilots. He will also lead a new commercial leadership team that includes leaders from engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance.

Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Takeshi Numoto and his team will join the new organization and report directly to Althoff, except for companywide matters like corporate brand and communications, for which he will continue reporting to Nadella.

Chief Operations Officer Carolina Dybeck Happe’s team will also join Althoff’s organization, but she will continue reporting to Nadella.

Read Nadella’s full email to Microsoft employees:

We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier and executing flawlessly across both.

History shows that general purpose technologies like 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 commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate. To accelerate this, we will increasingly need to bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice 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) into what it is today: the “number one seed” in the industry and our company’s most important growth engine.

Takeshi Numoto and his marketing team will join this new organization, with Takeshi reporting directly to Judson as CMO, while also continuing to report directly to me on all-up business models, planning, consumer marketing, and corporate brand and communications.

Our operations organization will also move to report to Judson. By bringing operations into the commercial business, we can tighten the 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 on our overall company transformation and continues to closely partner with Judson.

Additionally, Judson will lead a new commercial leadership team that brings together leaders from engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance to drive our product strategy and governance, GTM readiness, and sales motions with shared accountability for the rigor and executional excellence our customers expect.

This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work—across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation—to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift. Each one of us needs to be at our very best in terms of rapidly learning new skills, adopting new ways to work, and staying close to the metal to drive innovation across the entire stack!!

This isn’t just evolution, it’s reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft.

Satya

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