Microsoft has overhauled the leadership of its Copilot artificial intelligence business, merging its consumer and commercial teams under a single executive and redirecting Mustafa Suleyman, its most senior AI figure, to focus exclusively on developing the company's own AI models.
Jacob Andreou, who spent eight years at Snap, the social media company behind Snapchat, has been appointed executive vice president for Copilot, reporting directly to chief executive Satya Nadella.
Andreou will oversee design, product, growth and engineering across Copilot, which Microsoft sells both to individual consumers and to businesses as a productivity tool embedded in its Office and Microsoft 365 software suite.
Suleyman, who co-founded the AI research lab DeepMind before joining Microsoft in 2024 via the acquisition of his AI startup Inflection AI, will now lead what Microsoft is calling its superintelligence mission, focusing on building proprietary frontier AI models over the next five years.
The move is significant because it signals Microsoft's intention to become less dependent on OpenAI, its longtime partner and the maker of ChatGPT, for the underlying models that power its products.
Suleyman formed a dedicated superintelligence team at Microsoft in November and has described model development as the primary source of future value in the industry.
The restructuring also follows the retirement of Rajesh Jha, a longtime Microsoft executive who oversaw much of the company's productivity software for more than 35 years.
His responsibilities are being split across three executives who will now sit on the new Copilot Leadership Team alongside Andreou and Suleyman: Ryan Roslansky, the chief executive of LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns; Perry Clarke, who leads Microsoft 365 core infrastructure; and Charles Lamanna, who oversees business applications.
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The reorganisation reflects a growing urgency at Microsoft to make Copilot a more coherent product, as the current offering has won only 15 million paying business subscribers, roughly 3% of its broader Microsoft 365 user base, a figure that has disappointed investors tracking the return on the company's enormous AI spending.
Nadella framed the change as preparation for a shift in how AI is used, from tools that answer questions to systems capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks autonomously.
The recap
- Microsoft unifies consumer and commercial Copilot into one organisation
- Jacob Andreou named EVP, Copilot, reporting to Nadella
- Copilot Leadership Team will align teams over the next few weeks
