Microsoft just handed its top sales exec Judson Althoff the keys to a newly created commercial CEO role, consolidating sales, marketing, and operations under one leader. The move signals how seriously the company is taking its AI transformation push, with CEO Satya Nadella betting that tighter coordination is essential to compete in the artificial intelligence era.
Microsoft's latest leadership shuffle puts its $23 million-a-year sales chief at the center of the company's AI ambitions. Judson Althoff, who's been Microsoft's executive vice president and chief commercial officer, just got elevated to CEO of the entire commercial business - a role that didn't exist until today.
The timing isn't coincidental. Microsoft is locked in an intense AI arms race, and CEO Satya Nadella thinks the company needs tighter coordination between its sales, marketing, and operations teams to win enterprise customers. "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," Nadella wrote in Wednesday's internal memo.
Althoff's track record made him the obvious choice. Since joining from Oracle in 2013 as president of Microsoft's North America business, he's been one of the company's highest-paid executives, pulling in over $23 million in total compensation last fiscal year. That puts him in an elite tier of Microsoft leadership - and now he's got the title to match.
The commercial business Althoff now runs generates most of Microsoft's revenue through productivity software subscriptions and cloud services that power AI workloads using Nvidia chips. It's the engine that's been driving Microsoft's market cap toward $3 trillion, making this reorganization more than just corporate shuffling.
Nadella has been increasingly willing to hand out CEO titles to top lieutenants. LinkedIn has maintained its own CEO since Microsoft's 2016 acquisition. Last year, the company brought in Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, and immediately made him CEO of Microsoft AI, which includes Bing. Even GitHub operated under its own CEO until Thomas Dohmke left last month.
