Microsoft Launches New Core AI - Platform And Tools Group

“It’s clear that we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift,” Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a corporate blog post.

Microsoft announced a new division in its company Monday, Core AI – Platform and Tools, according to a blog post by chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.

The new division “will bring together Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive), with the mission to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents,” Nadella said in the post.

Facebook’s former head of engineering, Jay Parikh, will head up the new division.

“It’s clear that we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift. 2025 will be about model-forward applications that reshape all application categories. More so than any previous platform shift, every layer of the application stack will be impacted. It’s akin to GUI, internet servers, and cloud-native databases all being introduced into the app stack simultaneously,” Nadella said in the post.

Clearly, Microsoft is banking big on AI. Early last year, it released a miniaturized AI model called Phi-3 Mini, designed to deliver AI capabilities to everyday devices.

At last year’s Adobe Summit, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Adobe that would integrate Microsoft Copilot with Adobe Experience Cloud in an effort to bring marketers new AI capabilities, Microsoft said at the time.

At Microsoft’s own Build conference last summer, it made a slew of announcements about several AI initiatives including the launch of Copilot-integrated Microsoft Fabric – the company's analytics platform – and enhancements in Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio, CRN reported.

While Big Tech is in an AI feeding frenzy, adopting the technology in many products and services, customers are more hesitant. A survey released by Celigo in June 2024 of more than 1,200 global IT and operations leaders revealed that while 76 percent said they already have dedicated resources and a budget to put AI in place, many expressed concerns over security, how AI could ultimately benefit their organizations, and worries about AI replacing jobs.