Microsoft is overhauling how it runs Copilot—and in doing so, is finally admitting something its own employees have known for a while: the split between consumer and commercial AI teams wasn’t working. On Tuesday, CEO Satya Nadella announced that the two Copilot organisations will merge under a single leader, while Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman steps back from day-to-day product work to chase what he’s calling Microsoft’s “Superintelligence” mission.Jacob Andreou, a former Snap executive who joined Microsoft AI as corporate VP of product and growth, will now be executive vice president of Copilot. He’ll report directly to Nadella and take ownership of design, product, growth, and engineering across both the consumer and commercial Copilot experience. Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna—who recently took over responsibilities from retiring executive Rajesh Jha—will lead Microsoft 365 apps and the broader Copilot platform alongside Andreou.
Copilot’s fragmented identity has been a persistent problem for Microsoft
The reorg addresses a problem Microsoft has been slow to publicly acknowledge. Consumer and commercial Copilots have looked different, behaved differently, and shared almost nothing in terms of features. Internal surveys reportedly showed customers were confused by the multiple versions. Meanwhile, the numbers have been unflattering: Copilot had just 6 million daily active users in February, compared to ChatGPT’s 440 million and Google Gemini’s 82 million. The consolidation is a direct response to that gap.Suleyman, for his part, is framing his exit from Copilot as a promotion rather than a retreat. He told employees that frontier model development has always been his main focus and passion, and said he would dedicate the next five years to building enterprise-grade AI model lineages for Microsoft—focused on cost efficiency, benchmark performance, and reducing the company’s dependence on OpenAI.
Suleyman’s model push is also about reducing Microsoft’s OpenAI dependency
Microsoft hired Suleyman in 2024 to lead consumer Copilot and build AI models that could compete with those from OpenAI and other leading labs—but the proprietary model effort has moved slowly, with Microsoft’s models lagging in benchmark tests. The leadership reshuffle is partly a course correction on that front too.Andreou and Suleyman will stay connected: Suleyman confirmed Andreou retains a dotted-line reporting relationship to him, and that he will remain involved in Microsoft AI’s day-to-day operations.
Read AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s memo to Microsoft employees
Subject: A new structure for Microsoft AI
Technology and the future of our industry will be defined by two things: frontier models, and the products through which they are experienced. For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we best tackle these huge challenges, and today I’m excited to be evolving our structure at Microsoft AI, ensuring we’re positioned to succeed in both.I came to Microsoft with an overriding mission: to create Superintelligence that delivers a transformative, positive impact for millions of people. This requires us to build frontier models, at scale, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Everything else follows from this. It’s the foundation for our future as a company. With our ambitious, long-term frontier scale compute roadmap locked, we now have everything we need to build truly SOTA models.As you will have just heard from Satya, the next phase of this plan is to restructure our organisation to enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years. These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company. They’ll also enable us to deliver the COGS efficiencies necessary to be able to serve AI workloads at the immense scale required in the coming years. Achieving all this will be a huge challenge, and I’m committing everything we have—and I have personally—to make it happen.To that end, I’ve been working hard with other leaders in the background for a while now to define a strategy to unify Copilot by bringing together the Consumer and Commercial efforts as one. We all know this makes sense. Every user—whether at home or at work—will be able to enjoy the full benefit of what we are all building. Today, we’re combining these organisations into a single, unified Copilot org. Jacob has demonstrated himself to be an outstanding leader for the product experience and clearly has the product instincts, the operational range, and the conviction to make Copilot a great success.Jacob will retain a dotted line to me, and I’ll stay directly involved in much of the day-to-day operation of MAI, attending Meetups, MMMs, LT, and supporting Jacob to drive all areas of product strategy. To ensure that the models we build and the products we ship are mutually reinforcing, we are establishing a Copilot Leadership Team that includes me, Jacob, Charles Lamanna, Perry Clarke, and Ryan Roslansky. This will enable us to focus our brand strategy, our product roadmap, our models and our core infrastructure as one to deliver the best experiences possible for all our users.Thank you for everything you’ve done over the last few years. I know how hard everyone has been pushing and the sacrifices many of you have made to help the company adapt to this new era.We really do have an incredible opportunity to redefine Microsoft for this agentic revolution.Mustafa
