Introducing Core AI – Platform and Tools

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning.

As we begin the new year, it is clear that we are entering the next iterations of this AI platform shift. 2025 will be about model-advance apps reshaping all app categories. More than any previous platform change, this will affect every layer of the application stack. This is similar to a graphical user interface, web servers, and cloud native databases being introduced to the application suite at the same time. Thirty years of changes are summarized in three years!

We will build agent applications with memory, authorization, and action space that will inherit the powerful capabilities of the model. And we will adapt these capabilities for improved performance and security across different roles, business processes and industry domains. Furthermore, the way we build, deploy and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic.

This leads to a new AI-first set of applications — one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes for building with agents, multi-agent orchestration, and a reimagined management and observation layer. In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, as we build our AI platform and development tools—which include 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 those agents will come together to transform every category of SaaS applications, and the creation of custom applications will be software-driven (ie, “software-as-a-service”).

The good news is that we’ve been working on it for over two years and we’ve learned a lot in terms of systems, application platforms and tools needed for the AI ​​era. In order to more quickly and boldly advance our roadmap through each of these layers, we are creating a new engineering organization: CoreAI – Platform and Tools.

This new department will bring together the Dev Div, AI Platform and some key teams from the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes and Engineering Thrive), with the mission of building an end-to-end Copilot & AI suite for our first and third party customers to creation and launch of AI applications and agents. This group will also build the GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the lead AI product and the AI ​​platform to motivate the group and its plan.

Jay Parikh will lead this group as EVP CoreAI – Platform and Tools, with Eric Boyd, Jason Taylor, Julia Liuson, Tim Bozarth and their teams reporting to Jay.

Jay will work closely with Scott, Rajesh, Charlie, Mustafa and Kevin to optimize our entire technology stack for performance and efficiency. Additionally, Jay and the team will lead our progress and work on developer productivity and Engineering Thrive across the company.

As our cloud infrastructure business continues to grow and scale to become Microsoft’s largest business, Scott will continue to lead Cloud + AI to ensure we deliver the quality, security and innovation our customers and partners count on for their most critical applications, database tasks data and AI workloads.

Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our clients and our competition. When we talk about doing business as One Microsoft, we’re really talking about how we’re 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. There’s a lot of work and tremendous opportunity ahead of us, and I look forward to building what’s next together.

Satya