Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella is said to have become highly active in an internal Teams channel for roughly 100 of Microsoft’s top technical staff, posting extensively when he believes AI products are falling short.
Nadella runs a weekly hour-long meeting with many of the same staff, where he often grills them about their work, resulting in directives such as consolidating how different teams handle post-training, the latter stage of AI model development, a person who has listened to such meetings told The Information.
A few weeks ago, he sent an email to engineering leaders at the company who were working on a consumer version of Copilot, the AI-powered assistant inside several Microsoft products.
A Microsoft manager on the email thread noted that Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Gemini chatbot had recently gotten better at connecting with Google Drive for tasks like summarizing the contents of photos stored in folders.
Nadella, meanwhile, wasn’t pleased with how Microsoft’s version of that technology was performing. He noted that Microsoft programs for connecting Copilot with Gmail and Outlook “for [the] most part don’t really work” and are “not smart,” according to the email reviewed by The Information.
Over the past several months, Nadella has morphed into Microsoft’s (MSFT) most influential product manager, the report said. In September, he told Microsoft employees that he planned to delegate some of his responsibilities to focus more heavily on Microsoft’s development of AI products.
Big-tech CEOs are under pressure as they pour capital into AI, facing fierce competition and fears that revenue from AI products may not keep pace with spending.
Inside Microsoft, Nadella is reportedly notifying colleagues that this is a time of change when companies’ fortunes are made or lost, said a person who has heard his comments.
He’s also devoting more time to Microsoft’s AI recruiting efforts, personally making calls to potential hires and approving unusually high salaries to win over top talent from labs like OpenAI (OPENAI) and Google DeepMind, the report added.