Satya Nadella appoints a new CEO to run Microsoft's biggest businesses (www.theverge.com)

Microsoft has promoted Judson Althoff to CEO of its commercial business, consolidating sales, marketing and operations under his leadership while engineering remains separate. Satya Nadella framed the move as part of a response to a “tectonic AI platform shift,” saying it will tighten the feedback loop between customer needs and delivery and create a new commercial leadership team with shared accountability for product strategy, go‑to‑market readiness and execution. Takeshi Numoto’s marketing org and operations now report to Althoff, while Nadella and engineering leaders will focus on technical priorities like datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science and product innovation. For the AI/ML community this matters because it separates commercial scale and customer operations from technical R&D, enabling each to run faster: Althoff can accelerate enterprise adoption, partner motions and support for Azure/AI products, while Nadella concentrates on infrastructure and AI platform development. Expect tighter integration between customer feedback and product roadmaps, faster enterprise deployments, and potentially more aggressive SLAs and GTM programs for Microsoft’s AI services. The move follows Microsoft’s pattern of assigning CEOs to major businesses (Gaming, AI, LinkedIn) and signals an organizational bet on scaling AI transformation through closer commercial-engineering coordination rather than a change in overall leadership.