In a major leadership shake-up at Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella is stepping away from day-to-day oversight of the company’s commercial operations, handing the reins to longtime executive Judson Althoff. The move, announced via an internal email and detailed in a company blog post, elevates Althoff to CEO of Microsoft’s Commercial Business, where he will now lead global sales, marketing, and operations.
Microsoft has appointed longtime sales chief Judson Althoff to lead its marketing and operations, in a strategic move aimed at allowing CEO Satya Nadella and his engineering leadership to focus more closely on technical innovation, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence.
In an email to staff on Wednesday, October 1, Nadella revealed that Judson Althoff will become the CEO of Microsoft's Commercial Business. In this enhanced role, he will also oversee the company's operations organization. Takeshi Numoto, the Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, will be part of this new commercial business unit.
Nadella's email indicates that the change will allow him to focus more on the company's major data center growth, artificial intelligence, and product innovation. Althoff, who joined Microsoft in 2013, previously served as Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer. Before joining Microsoft, he held senior sales roles at Oracle and EMC.
We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier and executing flawlessly across both.
An image of Judson Althoff, chief executive officer of the commercial business at Microsoft.
History shows that general purpose technologies like AI drive step changes in productivity and GDP growth, and we have a unique opportunity to help our customers and the world realize this promise.
Our success depends on enabling commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate. To accelerate this, we will increasingly need to bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation.
With this context, I have asked Judson Althoff to take on an expanded role as CEO of our commercial business. Over the past nine years, Judson has led our global sales organization and was the architect behind designing and building Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) into what it is today: the “number one seed” in the industry and our company’s most important growth engine.
Takeshi Numoto and his marketing team will join this new organization, with Takeshi reporting directly to Judson as CMO, while also continuing to report directly to me on all-up business models, planning, consumer marketing, and corporate brand and communications.
Our operations organization will also move to report to Judson. By bringing operations into the commercial business, we can tighten the feedback loop between what customers need and how we deliver and support them. Carolina Dybeck Happe will continue to report to me, as she works on our overall company transformation and continues to closely partner with Judson.
Additionally, Judson will lead a new commercial leadership team that brings together leaders from engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance to drive our product strategy and governance, GTM readiness, and sales motions with shared accountability for the rigor and executional excellence our customers expect.
This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work—across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation—to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift. Each one of us needs to be at our very best in terms of rapidly learning new skills, adopting new ways to work, and staying close to the metal to drive innovation across the entire stack!!
This isn’t just evolution, it’s reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft.
Satya