Microsoft Launches CoreAI Division to Transform AI Application Development

Microsoft Launches CoreAI Division to Transform the AI Application Stack

EVP Jay Parikh will lead the CoreAI initiative to drive innovation and optimize Microsoft's AI capabilities. Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has outlined a vision for 2025, positioning AI as the cornerstone of the next major shift in application development. The company aims to reshape the entire application stack by integrating model-forward applications powered by autonomous agents. These AI-first applications will impact every category of software, compressing decades of technological evolution into just a few years. "Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!" he remarked. Also Read: Microsoft Signs Partnerships to Advance AI in Core Indian Sectors "We will build agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Further, how we build, deploy, and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic," Nadella explained in his communication. "This is leading to a new AI-first app stack -- one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a reimagined management and observability layer. In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools -- spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code -- on top of it. In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software (service as software)," he added. Also Read: Microsoft to Invest USD 3 Billion in India to Boost AI, Cloud, and Skilling: CEO At the core of this transformation is the creation of CoreAI - Platform and Tools, a new division designed to accelerate the development of AI infrastructure, tools, and capabilities. The division will bring together teams from Microsoft's Developer Division, AI Platform, and the Office of the CTO, with the mission to build the AI stack and developer tools that will power both first-party and third-party AI applications. "This new division will bring together Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive), with the mission to build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents. This group will also build out GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the leading AI-first product and the AI platform to motivate the stack and its roadmap," Nadella stated in a communication to Microsoft employees on January 13, 2025. The AI-first application stack will enable developers to create agentic applications, leveraging AI agents that feature memory, entitlements, and actions across a wide range of industries. These agents will be optimized for performance, safety, and efficiency, driving innovations in business processes, roles, and workflows. Also Read: IndiaAI and Microsoft Join Forces to Harness AI for Economic Transformation According to Nadella, Microsoft's Azure platform will serve as the backbone for these AI applications, offering infrastructure to build and deploy AI tools. Alongside this, tools like GitHub and VS Code will play a crucial role in supporting developers in creating, deploying, and managing AI applications and agents. Jay Parikh, EVP of CoreAI - Platform and Tools, will lead this new initiative, working closely with leaders across Microsoft to optimize the company's AI technology stack. The division will also integrate feedback from products like GitHub Copilot to refine the platform and accelerate progress. "Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure. We have a lot of work to do and a tremendous opportunity ahead, and together, I'm looking forward to building what comes next," Nadella concluded.

Amid a flurry of hype, Microsoft reorganizes entire dev team around AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a dramatic restructuring of the company's engineering organization -- all around pivoting the company's focus to developing the tools that will underpin agentic AI. Dubbed "CoreAI - Platform and Tools," the new division rolls the existing AI platform team and the previous developer division (which is responsible for everything from .NET to Visual Studio) along with some other teams into one big group. As for what this group will be doing specifically, it's basically everything that's mission critical to Microsoft in 2025, as Nadella tells it: This new division will bring together Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive), with the mission to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents. This group will also build out GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the leading AI-first product and the AI platform to motivate the stack and its roadmap. To accomplish all that, "Jay Parikh will lead this group as EVP." Parikh was hired by Microsoft in October; he previously worked as the VP and global head of engineering at Meta. The fact that the blog post doesn't say anything about .NET or Visual Studio, instead emphasizing GitHub Copilot and anything and everything related to agentic AI, says a lot about how Nadella sees Microsoft's future priorities. So-called AI agents are applications that are given specified boundaries (action spaces) and a large memory capacity to independently do subsets of the kinds of work that human office workers do today. Some company leaders and AI commentators believe these agents will outright replace jobs, while others are more conservative, suggesting they'll simply be powerful tools to streamline the jobs people already have.

Microsoft re-orgs to create CoreAI software team

Nad lad reckons 30 years of change is happening in three years as apps and services go 'agentic' Microsoft has revealed it's created an engineering team that CEO Satya Nadella feels is needed to cope with a potential huge change to software development processes and applications unleashed by AI. Nadella informed Microsofties of the overhaul in a letter Redmond decided to shared on Monday, and which opens with the CEO's opinion that "it's clear that we're entering the next innings of this AI platform shift. "2025 will be about model-forward applications that reshape all application categories. More so than any previous platform shift, every layer of the application stack will be impacted. It's akin to GUI, internet servers, and cloud-native databases all being introduced into the app stack simultaneously. Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!" The CEO opined that Microsoft is set to "build agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Further, how we build, deploy, and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic." The mention of "agentic" software is a reference to an emerging class of AI application developed to analyze data relevant to a particular business process or task and then suggest or initiate actions by itself. Salesforce has already built agentic tech that analyzes incoming sales inquiries and "autonomously engages with inbound leads in natural language to answer questions, handle objections and book meetings for human sellers," or so it claims - all within the CRM giant's own suite. Salesforce also said it's not hiring any more software engineers in 2025. Agentic AI may be able to work across applications from different vendors. We've seen case studies of it being used to detect fraudulent financial transactions and initiate workflows that deny service to those suspected of conducting them, then initiating investigations. The agent can drive workflows because it's connected to a bunch of applications through APIs. Detecting suspected fraud therefore results in instructions being sent to other apps, which may themselves use agents to process the incoming info. Agent-to-agent communications and the resulting actions are known as "agentic workflows" and in theory see lots of scutwork pushed into applications for processing, freeing humans to review decisions taken by agents and/or handle the really complex matters that agents can't yet understand well enough to automate. It's arguably just plain old software talking to plain old software, which would be nothing new. The new angle here, though, is that it's driven mainly by, shall we say, imaginative neural networks and models making decisions, rather than algorithms following entirely deterministic routes. Which is still software working with software. Nadella thinks building artificially intelligent agentic apps and workflows needs "a new AI-first app stack -- one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a reimagined management and observability layer." The CEO wants Microsoft to master that app stack so it can build stuff you want to buy: "In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools -- spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code -- on top of it. In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software." Nadella reckons Microsoft has learned what it must do to get there, and the job needs a dedicated team. So that's what he's created: An engineering organization called "CoreAI - Platform and Tools." The group will comprise some folk in Microsoft's developer division, others from Redmond's AI platform team, and even "some key teams from the Office of the CTO." The new org has been given a mission "to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents." The team will also take charge of GitHub Copilot, reflecting agentic AI's potential to automated code creation when allowed to analyze existing code bases and development activity. Nadella noted that "our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors". That's an odd observation given Microsoft published his letter, which concludes with this observation: "Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure. We have a lot of work to do and a tremendous opportunity ahead, and together, I'm looking forward to building what comes next." ®

Former Facebook Exec Now Heads Microsoft's New AI Engineering Team

Microsoft has announced the creation of a new engineering division, CoreAI - Platform and Tools, combining its Developer Division, AI platform teams, and staff from the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. This new group will focus on building AI platforms and tools for Microsoft and its customers, marking a major shift to centre AI development in its operations. This new division will be led by Jay Parikh, former Facebook engineering chief, who joined Microsoft in October 2024. According to details in the blog, as Executive Vice President of CoreAI - Platform and Tools, Parikh will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella and join the senior leadership team. In his role, he will oversee leaders including Eric Boyd (AI platform), Jason Taylor (Deputy CTO of AI Infrastructure), Julia Liuson (Developer Division), and Tim Bozarth (Developer Infrastructure). CEO Satya Nadella described the reorganisation as preparing for the "next innings of this AI platform shift" in 2025. He said this transformation will reshape software development, accelerating decades of change into just a few years. Nadella underlined an AI-first application stack that will change how developers create and deploy AI applications. Azure will provide the infrastructure, while Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code will support advanced AI tools and agents. "Our AI platform and tools will create agents, and these agents will change every SaaS application category, with custom applications driven by software as a service," he added. The CoreAI group will develop an end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for first-party and third-party customers to create and run AI applications. It appears that Nadella's memo highlights Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code, but excludes Visual Studio and .NET, indicating a shift to cloud-first, AI-focused tools.

Microsoft CEO Nadella forms new AI group to build and run apps for customers

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks in Seattle in May 2024.Jason Redmond / AFP via Getty Images file Microsoft is forming a new group focused on developing AI apps and providing tools for third-party customers, the company announced Monday. The new group will be led by Jay Parikh, the former CEO of cybersecurity startup Lacework and former global head of engineering at Meta. The group will be called Core AI -- Platform and Tools, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a memo to employees that was also published as a blog post. The mission, he said, is "to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents." The announcement comes 10 months after Microsoft hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Copilot AI initiatives. In that role, Suleyman is an executive vice president, reporting directly to Nadella. In Monday's post, Nadella said Parikh will work closely with Suleyman as well as Scott Guthrie, who runs cloud, technology chief Kevin Scott and other top tech leaders at the company. Parikh joined Microsoft in October as an executive vice president, also reporting to the CEO. Artificial intelligence has become the primary theme in tech since OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and Microsoft, as the principal investor in OpenAI, has been at the center of the boom. Microsoft counts on OpenAI's large language models for internal AI use when it comes to areas like content generation and code creation and also serves as the startup's main cloud partner. At the same time, Microsoft is developing products and tools that compete with some OpenAI services. Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in its SEC filings, and Nadella used the phrase "cooperation tension" while discussing the relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on a podcast released last month. "Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors," Nadella wrote in Monday's memo. The new group will bring together people working on developer and AI platforms, as well as teams from the Office of the CTO, Nadella said. "Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure," he wrote. Parikh joined Microsoft from Lacework, which had been a rapid growing and high-profile startup, soaring to a valuation of $8.3 billion in 2022, seven years after its founding. However, the company's fortunes turned when the market shifted away from risk, and Lacework was forced to dramatically cut staff to try and turn profitable. In August, security software vendor Fortinet closed its acquisition of Lacework for $149 million.

Microsoft forms new AI engineering group led by Jay Parikh - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft Corp. is forming a new engineering group that will be led by Jay Parikh, a former Meta Platforms Inc. executive who joined the company last year. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella announced the move today in a note to employees. The new unit is known as the CoreAI - Platform and Tools group. It will develop technology for Microsoft's Copilot family of artificial intelligence products. In today's memo, Nadella placed particular emphasis on GitHub Copilot, the AI-powered coding assistant offered by the company's GitHub unit. The new group will also work on products that can help Microsoft customers build their own machine learning services, including AI agents. Those are neural networks customized to perform a narrow set of tasks with a high degree of autonomy. The goal is to "build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents," Nadella detailed. The group will include several existing Microsoft teams. The list includes the company's AI Platform unit and Dev Div, which builds developer tools. The latter team is responsible for Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular code editors on the market, and the software development kits that ship with Microsoft products. SDKs are software bundles that include code examples, debugging tools and other resources meant to help developers more easily adopt a cloud service. The CoreAI - Platform and Tools group will also include several teams from Microsoft's Office of the CTO. Among them is Engineering Thrive, which is responsible for measuring and improving the efficiency of the company's development efforts. Microsoft's AI Supercomputer and AI Agentic Runtimes units will likewise become part of the new group. "We will build agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities," Nadella wrote. "And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains." The CoreAI - Platform and Tools group will be headed by Microsoft executive vice president Jay Parikh, who joined the company last year. He was earlier the CEO of Lacework Inc., a startup with a platform for finding vulnerabilities and malicious code in cloud environments. It was acquired by publicly-traded cybersecurity provider Fortinet Inc. in June for $149 million. Parikh was earlier the global head of engineering at Meta. During his time at the Facebook parent, the executive played a key role in building its data center network. Nadella detailed that Parikh will work closely with several other Microsoft executives including Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of the company's consumer AI group. Suleyman joined Microsoft last year after it hired most of the employees at Inflection AI Inc., a well-funded OpenAI competitor he led as CEO. The executive earlier co-founded Google LLC's DeepMind machine learning research group.

Microsoft CEO Nadella forms new AI group to build and run apps for customers

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the company event on AI technologies in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Tuesday, April 30, 2024. Microsoft is forming a new group focused on developing AI apps and providing tools for third-party customers, the company announced Monday. The new group will be led by Jay Parikh, the former CEO of cybersecurity startup Lacework and former global head of engineering at Meta. The group will be called Core AI - Platform and Tools, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a memo to employees that was also published as a blog post. The mission, he said, is "to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents." The announcement comes 10 months after Microsoft hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Copilot AI initiatives. In that role, Suleyman is an executive vice president, reporting directly to Nadella. In Monday's post, Nadella said Parikh will work closely with Suleyman as well as Scott Guthrie, who runs cloud, technology chief Kevin Scott and other top tech leaders at the company. Parikh joined Microsoft in October as an executive vice president, also reporting to the CEO. Artificial intelligence has become the primary theme in tech since OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and Microsoft, as the principal investor in OpenAI, has been at the center of the boom. Microsoft counts on OpenAI's large language models for internal AI use when it comes to areas like content generation and code creation and also serves as the startup's main cloud partner.

Microsoft forms new internal dev-focused AI org | TechCrunch

Microsoft has created a new engineering org aimed at accelerating AI infrastructure and software development within the company. According to Bloomberg, Jay Parikh, previously VP and global head of engineering at Meta, will lead the new division. He'll report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and oversee groups including the company's AI platform and developer teams. Parikh worked on technical infrastructure and data center projects at Meta. Before joining Microsoft in October, he was appointed the CEO of cloud security startup Lacework. The new org, called CoreAI -- Platform and Tools, is actually a combination of Microsoft's existing Dev Div and AI platform teams, The Verge reports, along with some employees on the Office of the CTO division. CoreAI effectively rejiggers Microsoft's developer teams to ensure AI remains a top priority. In an internal memo published on Microsoft's blog, Nadella said that Microsoft's focus for the coming year will be "model-forward" applications that "reshape all application categories."

Microsoft creates new AI engineering group led by former Meta executive

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined his vision for this new team in an internal memo today, using a cricket reference (his favorite sport) to note that "we're entering the next innings of this AI platform shift" in 2025 that will "reshape all application categories." Nadella believes that every part of the application stack will be impacted by AI, and that "thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!" To get ready for all this change, Nadella sees the need for an "AI-first app stack" inside Microsoft that will impact how its own developers use and build AI apps and tools in the future. "In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools -- spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code -- on top of it," says Nadella. "In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software (i.e. "service as software")."

Microsoft Launches CoreAI Division: Ex-Meta Exec To Supercharge Copilot And AI Innovations - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Microsoft earmarked $80B for AI-driven data centers, positioning Azure and Copilot as key growth drivers. On Monday, Microsoft Corp MSFT announced the creation of a new engineering organization called CoreAI -- Platform and Tools. This new division will bring together the Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive) to build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for its customers to build and run AI apps and agents. The group will also build out GitHub Copilot. Also Read: Microsoft, Salesforce Battle Heats Up As AI Agent Technology Takes Center Stage Former Meta Platforms Inc executive Jay Parikh will lead this group as EVP of CoreAI -- Platform and Tools. In October 2024, Microsoft appointed Parikh to its senior leadership team, reporting to Satya Nadella. Parikh previously served as Facebook's global head of engineering. Recently, Microsoft listed six AI trends for 2025, including models with advanced reasoning capabilities like OpenAI o1, AI-powered agents like Microsoft 365 Copilot, expecting Copilot to assist users in their daily lives, AI-enabling advancements in scientific research, improved energy efficiency in data centers and AI safety. In fiscal 2025, Microsoft earmarked $80 billion to develop data centers to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications. Prior reports indicated Microsoft is planning to reduce its dependence on OpenAI by integrating internal and third-party AI models into its Microsoft 365 Copilot product. BofA Securities noted Microsoft is well positioned to generate sustained low double-digit growth in the coming 3-5 years, led by the Azure cloud infrastructure platform, Office 365 productivity suite, and more profitable Games and Game Pass revenue in Xbox. Goldman Sachs described Microsoft as a compelling investment opportunity in the tech space, backed by its moat across the cloud stack and growing momentum in AI. Microsoft stock gained 7% in the last 12 months. In October 2024, the company reported first-quarter revenue of $65.60 billion, up 16%, above the Street consensus of $64.51 billion. EPS of $3.30 beat the Street consensus of $3.09. Intelligent Cloud grew by 20% to $24.1 billion. Investors can gain exposure to Microsoft through Vanguard Information Tech ETF VGT and SPDR Select Sector Fund - Technology XLK. Price Action: MSFT stock is down 0.42% at $415.44 at last check Tuesday. Also Read: Meta's Content Moderation Changes Alarm Advertisers as Zuckerberg Aligns with Trump and Musk Image via Shutterstock. MSFTMicrosoft Corp$415.43-0.42%Overview Rating:Speculative50%Technicals Analysis660100Financials Analysis400100WatchlistOverviewVGTVanguard Information Tech ETF$608.720.05%XLKSPDR Select Sector Fund - Technology$227.15-%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Microsoft forms new AI-focused group By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is establishing a new group dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and providing tools for external customers, CNBC reported on Monday. The group, named Core AI - Platform and Tools, will be guided by Jay Parikh, the ex-CEO of cybersecurity startup Lacework and previous global head of engineering at Meta (NASDAQ:META). Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared the information in a memo to employees, which was also released as a blog post. Nadella outlined the group's objective as building the comprehensive Copilot & AI stack for both Microsoft's internal and external customers, enabling the creation and operation of AI applications and agents. The formation of the new group follows Microsoft's hiring of DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman 10 months prior, to lead Copilot AI initiatives. Suleyman holds an executive vice president position, reporting directly to Nadella. In the same announcement, Nadella confirmed that Parikh will collaborate closely with Suleyman and Scott Guthrie, who oversees cloud, technology chief Kevin Scott, and other top tech leaders at Microsoft. Parikh joined Microsoft in October as an executive vice president, also directly reporting to the CEO.

Former Meta exec Jay Parikh to lead new Microsoft AI division

The company's new division, which is currently hiring, will be led by Jay Parikh. Microsoft yesterday (13 January) announced the establishment of a new artificial intelligence (AI) engineering group which will be led by Meta's former engineering chief, Jay Parikh. This marks the first major engineering shakeup at the company since Parikh first joined last October. According to a memo which was sent out by Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant's new CoreAI - Platform and Tools division, with Parikh acting as its EVP, will focus on creating AI apps and support tools for not only Microsoft, but also its customers as well. The new division will combine Microsoft's Dev Div and AI Platform teams together, in addition to a number of employees from the Office of the CTO team. Commenting further on the company's intentions, Nadella claimed that 2025 will revolve around "model-forward applications that reshape all application categories" and added his belief that "thirty years of change is being compressed into three years". As such, he wants Microsoft to prepare for this. Specifically, Nadella expressed his wish for an "AI-first app stack" inside Microsoft, which would impact how its own developers would use and build AI apps and tools. "We will build agentic applications with memory, entitlements and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes and industry domains," Nadella elaborated. "Further, how we build, deploy and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic." The memo also noted that AI platform chief Eric Boyd, deputy CTO of AI infrastructure Jason Taylor, head of Microsoft's developer division Julia Liuson, and head of developer infrastructure Tim Bozarth, along with their respective teams, will be reporting to Parikh as part of the new project. Parikh himself also welcomed the news of his appointment in a post on LinkedIn, where he echoed Nadella's sentiments about the state of AI technology. He also said that Microsoft is currently hiring for "the best people that share this vision". Although only two weeks have passed into the new year, Microsoft is already trying to keep its finger on the pulse of AI developments. In fact, last week, the business announced a $3bn investment in India focused on cloud and AI infrastructure. The investment will be spread over the next two years and aims to establish new data centres across the country. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Microsoft Says Recent Hire Parikh Will Oversee New AI Engineering Group

Microsoft Corp. has named Jay Parikh, who previously helped keep Facebook's infrastructure humming, executive vice president for a new artificial intelligence engineering division. Parikh, who joined Microsoft in the fall and reports to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, will oversee groups including the company's developer division and AI platform, as well as teams working on AI supercomputers and agents. Microsoft hadn't previously disclosed what Parikh would be doing. Microsoft has been overhauling its entire product lineup around artificial intelligence and needs to manage complex infrastructure projects that can help it wring greater power and efficiency from its networks. Thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is at the forefront of the effort to build tools that rely on generative artificial intelligence. The company is racing to build data centers and chips to back that effort.

Microsoft Says Recent Hire Parikh Will Oversee New AI Engineering Group

(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. has named Jay Parikh, who previously helped keep Facebook's infrastructure humming, executive vice president for a new artificial intelligence engineering division.Parikh, who joined Microsoft in the fall and reports to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, will oversee groups including the company's developer division and AI platform, as well as teams working on AI supercomputers and agents. Microsoft hadn't previously disclosed what Parikh would be doing. Microsoft has been overhauling its entire product lineup around artificial intelligence and needs to manage complex infrastructure projects that can help it wring greater power and efficiency from its networks. Thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is at the forefront of the effort to build tools that rely on generative artificial intelligence. The company is racing to build data centers and chips to back that effort. "As we begin the new year, it's clear that we're entering the next innings of this AI platform shift," Nadella wrote in an email to employees announcing the changes. "Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!" Parikh joined Facebook in 2009 and spent more than a decade there, working on technical infrastructure and data center projects that helped the company grow into the world's largest social network. He left the company now known as Meta Platforms Inc. in 2021 and became CEO of cloud security startup Lacework Inc. Meta broke ground on more than a dozen data centers around the world while Parikh was there. As many technology companies unplugged their own data centers in favor of rented computing power from Microsoft or Amazon.com Inc., Meta remained one of the few companies capable of building cutting-edge server farms at massive scale. Parikh oversaw several other technical projects, including Meta's efforts in subsea cables and its ill-fated Aquila drone project intended to beam wireless internet down to rural places in the US.