Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman speaks during an event highlighting Microsoft Copilot, the company’s AI tool, on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington. The company also celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Microsoft said Tuesday that it’s bringing together the engineering groups for its commercial and consumer Copilot assistants, which have yet to gain broad adoption.
Jacob Andreou, a former Snap executive who works in Microsoft’s artificial intelligence unit, will become an executive vice president in charge of the consumer and commercial Copilot 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 Nadella, will lead Microsoft 365 applications and the Copilot platform, Nadella wrote.
The Copilot moves will free up executive Mustafa Suleyman, a former co-founder of AI lab DeepMind that Google bought in 2014, to focus more on building new models.
Since arriving at Microsoft through the Inflection deal in 2024, Suleyman has spent time working on Copilot for consumers, among other initiatives.
In November, Microsoft announced the formation of a Superintelligence group under Suleyman.
“The next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization 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,” Suleyman wrote in a memo. “These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company.”
The models will also allow Microsoft to get better cost efficiencies, Suleyman wrote.
He said he will “stay directly involved in much of the day-to-day operation” of the broad Microsoft AI group that includes products such as the Bing search engine.
“We are doubling down on our superintelligence mission with the talent and compute to build models that have real product impact, in terms of evals, COGS reduction, as well as advancing the frontier when it comes to meeting enterprise needs and achieving the next set of research breakthroughs,” Nadella wrote.
Microsoft incorporates generative AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, but OpenAI’s own ChatGPT assistant is more widely used than Microsoft’s Copilot for consumers.
About 3% of commercial users with Office productivity software subscriptions have access to the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on. There is also Google’s Gemini assistant to contend with across the board.
The shake-up comes as pressure mounts on software companies to show a return on AI investments, as investors worry that the models could pressure software incumbents.
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector Exchange-Traded Fund is down about 19% so far this year, with Microsoft down 17% in that period.
Microsoft is constructing models for generating source code, images and audio, and for reasoning, which produces answers that people can find more thoughtful but requires more time, Suleyman said. At the same time, Microsoft will continue to rely on intellectual property from OpenAI through its broad agreement with the model developer.
“I’m genuinely thrilled about this change precisely because most of the future value is going to accrue to the model layer, and my job is to create highly COGS-optimized, highly efficient enterprise specific model lineages for Microsoft over the next three to five years,” Suleyman said in an interview, using the acronym for cost of goods sold. “That is singularly the objective, precisely because the model is the product, right? That is the future direction of all the IP.”
WATCH: Microsoft shifts from OpenAI exclusivity and expands its AI basket
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/microsoft-copilot-ai-suleyman.html
