Microsoft Reshuffles Leadership: LinkedIn CEO to Oversee Office Products in AI-Driven Reorganization

Microsoft's LinkedIn chief is now running Office as part of an AI reorg

In a separate memo, Lamanna also announced that starting July 2nd Lili Cheng will take on the newly expanded role of CTO of the BIC team. Dan Lewis is also taking on the role of corporate vice president of Copilot Studio. "We are poised to reinvent every role and every business process, and start to reimagine organizations as composed of people and agents," says Lamanna in an internal memo. Both the Lamanna and Roslansky moves are very interesting, as the business Copilot team and Microsoft 365 Copilot team have been in separate parts of Microsoft's sprawling AI and cloud teams up until this point. This has led to a situation where nobody really owns Copilot all up inside Microsoft, but now the separate leaders of Microsoft 365 Copilot and the business Copilot teams now both report to Rajesh Jha. The consumer Copilot will still be run by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.

Microsoft's LinkedIn Chief to Run Office Group in AI Shakeup

The chief of Microsoft Corp.'s LinkedIn is taking charge of the teams that build email and productivity apps, in a reorganization that consolidates more of the company's workplace software as it seeks to speed up deployment of artificial intelligence tools. Ryan Roslansky, the professional networking site's chief executive officer since 2020, will tack on responsibility for the teams behind Outlook, Word, Excel and the rest of the Office bundle, Microsoft told employees on Wednesday. He'll report to Rajesh Jha, a top engineering executive whose organization includes Windows and business software. In Roslansky's capacity as LinkedIn CEO, he'll continue to report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

LinkedIn CEO to take over Office, more AI duties in Microsoft executive shuffle

SAN FRANCISCO, June 4 (Reuters) - The CEO of LinkedIn will take additional responsibility for Microsoft's Office products, while an executive responsible for one of the company's leading business-to-business artificial intelligence products will start reporting to head of the company's Windows unit, according to a memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella viewed by Reuters. Ryan Roslansky, who oversees the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, will remain CEO of LinkedIn but also oversee products such as Word and Excel and also "Copilot," Microsoft's leading AI product, within the company's productivity software suite, the memo said. Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha, who oversees Microsoft Windows and Teams, among other duties. The memo said existing Office leaders Sumit Chauhan and Gaurav Sareen will report to Jha as well. Also moving to report to Jha will be Charles Lamanna, who leads "Copilot" for business and industrial users, the memo said. Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco Editing by Nick Zieminski Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft gives LinkedIn chief Roslansky added role running Office

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky speaks at the Concordia Annual Summit in New York on Sept. 20, 2021. in New York City. Microsoft is giving LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky a bigger job, expanding his role to include oversight of Office productivity software, CNBC has learned. Roslansky, who took over LinkedIn five years ago, is becoming executive vice president of Office, reporting to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft's executive vice president for experiences and devices, according to a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella informed employees about the change in an email on Wednesday, said the person, who asked not to be named because the email was internal. In his role as LinkedIn CEO, Roslansky will continue to report to Nadella, the person said. LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016 for $27 billion, will keep operating as a subsidiary, after generating more than $17 billion in revenue over the past year. Roslansky joined LinkedIn in 2009 and previously worked at Yahoo. In 2022, Microsoft rebranded its Office 365 productivity software bundle, which includes applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, to Microsoft 365. In addition to overseeing those products, Roslansky's portfolio will also include the M365 Copilot app, which lets users edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Jha's group released the app in 2020. As part of the organizational change, Microsoft said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for business and industry Copilot products, and his team will move to Jha's unit. They were previously part of Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie's cloud and artificial intelligence group. Lamanna supervises Dynamics 365 sales and customer service products that compete with Salesforce, as well as the Copilot Studio tool for easily building artificial intelligence agents. In December, Nadella said that AI agents might become the way that people eventually interact with software systems that were designed for use inside large organizations. "When was the last time any of us really went to a business application?" he told investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on their podcast. He said the company pays for a bunch of cloud software applications, but "we hardly use them and somebody in the org is sort of inputting data into it." "In the AI age, the intensity goes up because all that data now is easy, right?" Nadella said. The company's Productivity and Business Processes segment, anchored by Microsoft 365 subscriptions and LinkedIn, has turned more profitable in the past decade. The unit's operating margin in the fiscal third quarter exceeded 58%, compared with 33% in 2017. Revenue was up 10% from a year earlier.

Microsoft taps LinkedIn CEO for dual role leading Office in AI strategy shift

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky will take on a second role under a new Microsoft organizational structure, overseeing Office apps in addition to leading the business networking platform acquired by the Redmond company nine years ago. Microsoft is announcing the change internally Wednesday morning. As executive vice president for Office, Roslansky will be responsible for Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, while continuing as LinkedIn CEO. The move is intended to tap Roslansky's product experience and strengthen the ties between Microsoft's core platforms as it pursues its "agentic web" AI strategy. In the Office role, Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft's EVP of Experiences + Devices. Roslansky will still report to CEO Satya Nadella for LinkedIn. Office leaders Sumit Chauhan and Gaurav Sareen will remain in their roles, according to the company, now reporting to Roslansky as part of the new structure. The changes consolidate Microsoft's productivity and business applications under one division, aiming to create tighter integration among LinkedIn, Microsoft 365 (including Office apps), and Dynamics 365 as it develops cross-platform AI tools. Microsoft's reshuffling comes amid intensifying competition to integrate AI agents across different types of business software and cloud services, going up against rivals such as Salesforce, Amazon and Google. The company acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, but has let it operate largely independently, without the deep integrations seen across Microsoft's other businesses. Roslansky, who has led LinkedIn since 2020, guided the company through the pandemic and expanded its use of AI and skills-based tools. LinkedIn generated $13.2 billion in revenue during the first nine months of Microsoft's fiscal year, up 8% from $12.1 billion in the same period last year. It ranked as Microsoft's fourth-largest business line by revenue, behind Server Products and Cloud Services ($70.6 billion); Microsoft 365 Commercial ($63.5 billion); and Gaming ($17.9 billion).

LinkedIn CEO to take over Office, more AI duties in Microsoft executive shuffle

The CEO of LinkedIn will take additional responsibility for Microsoft's Office products, while an executive responsible for one of the company's leading business-to-business artificial intelligence products will start reporting to head of the company's Windows unit, according to a memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella viewed by Reuters. Ryan Roslansky, who oversees the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, will remain CEO of LinkedIn but also oversee products such as Word and Excel and also "Copilot," Microsoft's leading AI product, within the company's productivity software suite, the memo said. Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha, who oversees Microsoft Windows and Teams, among other duties. The memo said existing Office leaders Sumit Chauhan and Gaurav Sareen will report to Jha as well. Also moving to report to Jha will be Charles Lamanna, who leads "Copilot" for business and industrial users, the memo said.

LinkedIn CEO to take over Office, more AI duties in Microsoft executive shuffle

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -The CEO of LinkedIn will take additional responsibility for Microsoft's Office products, while an executive responsible for one of the company's leading business-to-business artificial intelligence products will start reporting to head of the company's Windows unit, according to a memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella viewed by Reuters. Ryan Roslansky, who oversees the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, will remain CEO of LinkedIn but also oversee products such as Word and Excel and also "Copilot," Microsoft's leading AI product, within the company's productivity software suite, the memo said. Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha, who oversees Microsoft Windows and Teams, among other duties. The memo said existing Office leaders Sumit Chauhan and Gaurav Sareen will report to Jha as well. Also moving to report to Jha will be Charles Lamanna, who leads "Copilot" for business and industrial users, the memo said. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San FranciscoEditing by Nick Zieminski)