Microsoft just made its biggest leadership move since the AI boom began. Satya Nadella is promoting Judson Althoff, the company's nine-year sales chief, to CEO of Microsoft's entire commercial business - the division that generates most of the company's revenue from enterprise customers. The restructuring comes as Nadella calls the current moment a "tectonic AI platform shift" that demands Microsoft reinvent how it operates.
Microsoft just shuffled its executive deck in the most significant way since the AI race heated up. Satya Nadella announced today he's promoting Judson Althoff from executive vice president to CEO of Microsoft's commercial business, putting him in charge of the company's most important money-making engine.
The timing isn't coincidental. In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Nadella described the current environment as a "tectonic AI platform shift" that requires Microsoft to "both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier."
Althoff has been Microsoft's global sales leader for nearly a decade, architecting what Nadella calls the company's "most important growth engine." His Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) division has become what Nadella describes as "the number one seed in the industry." Now he's getting expanded control over the operations and marketing teams that help sell Microsoft's cloud services, productivity software, and AI tools to businesses worldwide.
"By bringing operations into the commercial business, we can tighten the feedback loop between what customers need and how we deliver and support them," Nadella explained in his memo. Marketing chief Takeshi Numoto will now report directly to Althoff as CMO, though he'll maintain a dual reporting relationship with Nadella on broader strategic initiatives.
This isn't Microsoft's first experiment with divisional CEOs. Phil Spencer has been running Microsoft Gaming as CEO, while the company brought in Mustafa Suleyman earlier this year as Microsoft AI CEO. The pattern suggests Nadella is distributing operational leadership while keeping strategic control - though the GitHub CEO position notably disappeared after Thomas Dohmke's resignation over the summer.
But Althoff's promotion feels different. He's now overseeing the primary way Microsoft generates revenue from enterprise customers - the businesses paying for Office 365, Azure cloud services, and increasingly, AI-powered productivity tools like Copilot. It's the kind of role that in another company might signal succession planning.
