Microsoft is creating a new AI-focused engineering group, led by former Meta engineering chief Jay Parikh, to help the software giant enter “the next innings of this AI platform shift” in 2025 that will “reshape all application categories.”
“As we begin the new year, it’s clear that we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in an internal memo outlining his vision for the new team. “2025 will be about model-forward applications that reshape all application categories.”
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“Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors,” he wrote. “When we talk about operating as One Microsoft, we are effectively talking about how we are continually increasing our customer focus, raising the bar on our innovation, and driving accountability, so we can truly live up to our mission.”
“Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure,” Nadella wrote. “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 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”).”
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Parikh will lead the new CoreAI – Platform and Tools division as executive vice president. Combining Microsoft’s Dev Div and AI platform teams together, alongside some employees on the Office of the CTO team, it would focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
Parikh who joined Microsoft in October after being instrumental to Meta’s engineering efforts for more than a decade, reports directly to Nadella and is a member of Microsoft’s senior leadership team.
He now has a number of other Microsoft executives reporting up to him in his new role, including 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.