Microsoft CEO Injects ‘Sense of Urgency’ Into AI Efforts

Microsoft’s CEO has reportedly undertaken major changes to bolster the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) business.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday (Dec. 30), those changes include an overhaul of Microsoft’s senior leadership as Satya Nadella looks to keep the company ahead in the AI race following the restructuring of its partnership with OpenAI.

The chief executive is reacting to increased competition in the AI space and looking to accelerate progress on developing Microsoft’s AI models and coding tools and applications, more than half a dozen current and former Microsoft executives told the FT.

“Satya is in ‘founder mode’,” said Dee Templeton, deputy chief technology officer at Microsoft, a reference to the hands-on leadership style coined by tech investor Paul Graham.

Sources close to Nadella say he is also focused on the increasing competition from Amazon and Google as those companies make advances in infrastructure and model development.

The report notes that while Microsoft 365’s AI assistant Copilot has topped 150 million monthly active users, that’s still short of the numbers enjoyed by Google (650 million) and OpenAI (800 million) for their chatbots.

“Satya is trying to demonstrate a sense of urgency,” said one Microsoft executive. “The goal is to get out of some of the structures that exist and make the route to him easier.”

The FT adds that Microsoft achieved an early edge in AI thanks to its multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, getting access to that company’s technology and data center contracts. However, Microsoft will lose access to OpenAI’s research and has given up exclusivity over its data center needs under the new deal struck with OpenAI in October.

The report follows a similar story by The Information last week which said Nadella was unhappy with the company’s progress on Copilot and had begun taking a more hands-on approach.

In other artificial intelligence news, PYMNTS recently looked back on the year in agentic AI, pointing to PYMNTS Intelligence research showing that in May, 85% of chief financial officers surveyed said they had no plans to implement agentic AI.

But by July, newer findings showed agentic AI moving from discussions to testing at a small but increasing number of companies, with strict guardrails around scope and authority.

“That pattern now defines the early playbook for banks and payment providers,” PYMNTS wrote. “Agents are being deployed into money-adjacent workflows, such as exceptions handling, invoice matching, collections support and dispute triage, where errors are visible and reversible. Institutions that can safely orchestrate these use cases and align controls to client readiness are moving first.”