Microsoft promoted a new CEO of its commercial business and is combining teams to compete in AI (www.businessinsider.com)

Microsoft promoted longtime sales chief Judson Althoff to CEO of its commercial business, consolidating sales, marketing, and operations under his leadership to better compete for AI customers. CEO Satya Nadella said the move will bring Microsoft’s commercial products — including its line of AI Copilots — into a single organization. CMO Takeshi Numoto and his marketing team will report to Althoff (while still answering to Nadella on companywide brand and planning), and the operations organization will move into Althoff’s unit even as COO Carolina Dybeck Happe continues to report to Nadella. Althoff will also head a new commercial leadership team that includes engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance. For the AI/ML community this is a strategic signal: Microsoft is turning go-to-market, delivery, and product governance into a tightly integrated machine to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. By tightening the feedback loop between customer-facing teams and ops/engineering, the reorg aims to speed deployment, improve support for Copilots and other AI services, and align commercial incentives with engineering priorities like datacenter buildout, systems architecture, and AI science. It’s less a tech launch than an organizational bet — one that could materially affect how quickly and effectively enterprises integrate large-scale AI into production.