Microsoft appoints new Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, issued the following message to Microsoft employees this morning.

As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, I reflect on how we have remained a major company for decades in an industry where franchise value doesn’t exist. And that’s because time and time again, when the technical paradigms have shifted, we’ve seized the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. And that’s exactly what we’re doing again today with this AI platform shift.

To continue to be successful as a company, we must raise the bar on our operational excellence and continually improve the safety, quality and delivery to our customers, as well as the precision with which we conduct our business. Building this capability is critical, and I want each of us to take as much pride in exceeding customer expectations in our fundamentals as we do in our product innovation. Finally, both are crucial for our customers and our future.

In this context, I am very pleased to announce that Carolina Dybeck Happe is joining Microsoft as EVP and Chief Operations Officer. In this newly created role, she will join the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and report to me.

I have admired Carolina through her work as a global business leader, including most recently her role in leading GE’s historic turnaround. She is known for her ability to drive transformative change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value. Carolina will work with the SLT to help us drive continuous business process improvement across all of our organizations and accelerate our enterprise-wide AI transformation to increase value for customers and partners.

As part of this transition, the Commerce + Ecosystems organization in Cloud + AI, the Microsoft Digital organization in Experiences + Devices, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in Finance will report to Carolina. These teams do mission-critical work for us and have ambitious plans for how we can support our partners, customers, and employees with best-in-class technology and experiences.

I look forward to seeing the progress we will make together as we focus on continuous improvement in everything we do.

Please join me in welcoming Carolina to Microsoft.

Satya