President of Microsoft North America Judson Althoff speaks on stage during We Day at KeyArena in Seattle, Washington, on April 23, 2015.
Mat Hayward | Getty Images
Microsoft‘s top-ranking sales leader, Judson Althoff, has been promoted to a bigger role as CEO of the company’s commercial business.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, wrote in a memo on Wednesday that marketing and operations will move under Althoff’s organization. Most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from commercial offerings such as productivity software subscriptions and cloud-based Nvidia chips for running artificial intelligence models.
“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,” Nadella wrote in the email. “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.”
Althoff, who joined from Oracle as president of Microsoft’s North America business in 2013, was already among Microsoft’s highest-paid executives, receiving more than $23 million in total pay in the 2024 fiscal year. His most recent title was executive vice president and chief commercial officer.
Under Nadella, who replaced Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014, Microsoft has more frequently used the CEO title for select executives.
LinkedIn has had a CEO since Microsoft acquired the company in 2016. Last year, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of the DeepMind AI lab now owned by Google, and made him CEO of a group called Microsoft AI that includes Bing. GitHub, which Microsoft bought in 2018, had a CEO until last month, when Thomas Dohmke left the company.
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