Cool new feature alert! You can now follow your favorite BI journalists to stay up-to-date on all their great stories. Once you’re following them, you’ll get updates anytime they publish a new story. But that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to stop reading the newsletter. (I’ve got kids to feed.)
In today’s big story, Microsoft’s “reinvention” due to AI means rethinking its structure. It’s not the only one.
What’s on deck:
Markets: Hedge funds’ September report cards are in.
Tech: Two BI reporters discuss if social media’s future could be silly AI videos of your friends.
Business: The best way to get an open job might be to get it before it’s an open job.
But first, ready for (AI) war.
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“We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn’t mince words when recently addressing employees about the state of the industry. And the tech giant is keen to move with it.
Case in point: Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s longtime sales chief, was named CEO of the company’s commercial business.
It shows how Big Tech giants are rushing to get their ducks in a row — particularly within their sales divisions — ahead of a critical (and expensive) fight over AI adoption.
(If you want to go even deeper on this type of stuff, I suggest you subscribe to Alistair Barr’s fantastic Tech Memo newsletter, out every Friday. No one is doing a better job of covering the business side of AI.)
So what exactly does Althoff’s promotion mean? He adds marketing and operations to his remit, allowing “our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work,” Nadella wrote.
In short: Let the sales guy figure out the business side of things while the rest of us cook up cool AI stuff.
Althoff, who already revamped his sales team to be more AI-centric, has his work cut out for him. BI’s Ashley Stewart, our resident Microsoft expert, heard audio from an internal meeting where employees complained about confusion over the multiple apps with the Copilot branding.
Nadella’s solution? Think big. Like, really big.
“The one way to make it less confusing is to have a billion users of each,” he said.
Microsoft’s not alone in reshaping itself for the AI era.
Eugene Kim has reported extensively on Amazon’s efforts to get its AI products up to snuff. Q Developer, Amazon’s AI coding assistant, posted some disappointing revenue numbers compared to rivals in its first year.
Cool new feature alert! You can now follow your favorite BI journalists to stay up-to-date on all their great stories. Once you’re following them, you’ll get updates anytime they publish a new story. But that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to stop reading the newsletter. (I’ve got kids to feed.)
In today’s big story, Microsoft’s “reinvention” due to AI means rethinking its structure. It’s not the only one.
What’s on deck:
Markets: Hedge funds’ September report cards are in.
Tech: Two BI reporters discuss if social media’s future could be silly AI videos of your friends.
Business: The best way to get an open job might be to get it before it’s an open job.
But first, ready for (AI) war.
If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.
“We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn’t mince words when recently addressing employees about the state of the industry. And the tech giant is keen to move with it.
Case in point: Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s longtime sales chief, was named CEO of the company’s commercial business.
It shows how Big Tech giants are rushing to get their ducks in a row — particularly within their sales divisions — ahead of a critical (and expensive) fight over AI adoption.
(If you want to go even deeper on this type of stuff, I suggest you subscribe to Alistair Barr’s fantastic Tech Memo newsletter, out every Friday. No one is doing a better job of covering the business side of AI.)
So what exactly does Althoff’s promotion mean? He adds marketing and operations to his remit, allowing “our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work,” Nadella wrote.
In short: Let the sales guy figure out the business side of things while the rest of us cook up cool AI stuff.
Althoff, who already revamped his sales team to be more AI-centric, has his work cut out for him. BI’s Ashley Stewart, our resident Microsoft expert, heard audio from an internal meeting where employees complained about confusion over the multiple apps with the Copilot branding.
Nadella’s solution? Think big. Like, really big.
“The one way to make it less confusing is to have a billion users of each,” he said.
Microsoft’s not alone in reshaping itself for the AI era.
Eugene Kim has reported extensively on Amazon’s efforts to get its AI products up to snuff. Q Developer, Amazon’s AI coding assistant, posted some disappointing revenue numbers compared to rivals in its first year.
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