Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, speaks at an event highlighting Microsoft Copilot, the company’s AI tool, April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington. The company also celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Microsoft said Tuesday it was bringing together engineering groups for its commercial and consumer projects Co-pilot assistants, which have not yet been widely adopted.
Jacob Andreou, a former Instant executive who works at Microsoft artificial intelligence unit, will become executive vice president in charge of the Copilot consumer and commercial experience, CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.
Andreou will report to Nadella. Executives Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke and Charles Lamanna, who will also report to Nadellawill lead Microsoft 365 apps and the Copilot platform, Nadella wrote.
Copilot’s steps will free executive Mustafa Suleyman, former co-founder of the AI laboratory DeepMind who Google purchased in 2014, to focus more on building new models.
“The next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization to allow me to focus all of my energy on our superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world-class models to Microsoft over the next five years,” Suleyman wrote in a memo. “These models will allow us to create business-friendly bloodlines that will help improve all of our products within the business. »
Since his arrival at Microsoft via the Chord inflection in 2024, Suleyman spent time working on Copilot for consumers, among other initiatives.
Microsoft’s Copilot app had 6 million daily active users in December, while ChatGPT had 392 million and Gemini had 62 million, according to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Microsoft integrates generative AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, but OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant is more widely used than Microsoft’s Copilot for consumers.
About 3% of business users with an Office productivity software subscription have access to the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on. There is also Google Gemini wizard to face at all levels.
Read more CNBC tech newsIn November, Microsoft announced the creation of a Superintelligence group under the leadership of Suleyman, who said Tuesday that developing frontier models has always been his main goal and passion.
He said he would “remain directly involved in much of the day-to-day operations” of the vast Microsoft AI group that includes products such as the Bing search engine.
Google controlled 90% of the search engine market share in February, while Bing had about 5%, according to estimates from web analytics firm StatCounter.
“We are doubling down on our superintelligence mission with the talent and compute needed to build models that have real impact on products, in terms of ratings, COGS reduction, as well as pushing the boundaries when it comes to meeting business needs and achieving the next round of research breakthroughs,” Nadella wrote.
The shake-up comes as pressure mounts on software companies to show a return on AI investments, with investors concerned the models could put pressure on incumbent software companies.
THE iShares Broader Technology Software Sector Exchange Traded Fund is down about 19% so far this year, with Microsoft down 17% during that time.
Microsoft builds models for generating source code, images and sound, and for reasoning, that produce answers that people may find more thoughtful but require more time, Suleyman said.
At the same time, Microsoft will continue to rely on OpenAI’s intellectual property. In October, Microsoft said it holds intellectual property rights to OpenAI models and products until 2032.
“I’m really excited about this change, precisely because most of the future value will come back to the model layer, and my job is to create highly COGS-optimized, highly efficient enterprise-specific model lines for Microsoft over the next three to five years,” Suleyman said in an interview, using the acronym cost of goods sold. “That’s singularly the goal, precisely because the design is the product, right? That’s the future direction of all intellectual property.”
WATCH: Microsoft abandons OpenAI exclusivity and expands its AI basket