Microsoft, new proxies to free Nadella on AI

Artificial Intelligence as a North Star, for Microsoft. And thus also at the centre of decisions. The company has announced a reorganisation of its organisational structure that marks a strategic shift in the AI race. Judson Althoff, the current Chief Commercial Officer, will assume the new position of CEO of the commercial business, leading a division that will merge sales, marketing and operations.

A move that should allow Satya Nadella, the group's CEO, to focus more on technical aspects and innovation, with the aim of strengthening the company's role in the global AI competition.

And it was Nadella himself, in a post published in these hours, who explained that the reorganisation will allow him and the other engineering leaders to keep the focus on the most ambitious projects (from building new data centres to systems architecture, from scientific research on artificial intelligence to the development of innovative products).

Judson Althoff is a veteran at Microsoft. He arrived in 2013 as president of the North American division and will now also head a new business leadership team that will bring together figures from engineering, sales, marketing, operations and finance.

Still on the subject of AI, it is worth noting that Microsoft has decided to focus increasingly on its semiconductors to power the data centres of the future, with the aim of reducing dependence on external suppliers such as Nvidia and AMD. This was stated by Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of the group, during a speech at Italian Tech Week. The Redmond-based company today mainly uses Nvidia GPUs, which have dominated the market thanks to their performance in the field of artificial intelligence, and to a lesser extent AMD chips. But the strategy is set to change: in the long term, Scott explained, the priority will be to have mainly chips developed in-house by Microsoft.