Microsoft is reorganizing its top leadership team, appointing longtime sales chief Judson Althoff to oversee marketing and operations in a move designed to allow CEO Satya Nadella and his engineering leaders to concentrate on technical innovation, particularly in artificial intelligence.In an email to employees on Wednesday, October 1, Nadella announced that Althoff will take on the new role of CEO of Microsoft’s Commercial Business. This expanded position will also see him assume responsibility for the company’s operations organization. Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer, will join this new commercial business unit.According to Nadella’s email, the shift will enable him to dedicate more time to the company’s significant data center expansion, artificial intelligence, and product development.Althoff, who joined Microsoft in 2013, was previously the executive vice president and chief commercial officer. Before his time at Microsoft, he held senior sales positions at Oracle and EMC. The reorganization comes shortly after Althoff’s return from an eight-week sabbatical.
Here’s CEO Satya Nadella’s email to Microsoft employees on the restructuring:
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.An image of Judson Althoff, chief executive officer of the commercial business at Microsoft.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
