The third coming of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman

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The third coming of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman

By Harry McCracken

Microsoft employees stream down a hallway by the dozen, smartphones and paper coffee cups in hand, many clad in heavy coats on this frigid February morning. The setting is idyllic—Lake Washington is in full view through floor-to-ceiling windows—but they stride purposefully. As they do, they pass a digital sign with a tersely worded call to action:

All squads ship

Competing/differentiating

Growing work every sprint to double Successful Sessions

ABS (Always Be Shipping)

Despite the profusion of Microsofties on the premises, this isn’t Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus. Instead, these staffers have taken over a Hyatt hotel in Renton, another Seattle suburb. They work for a division known as Microsoft AI—MAI for short—and have traveled from corporate outposts as distant as the U.K., Switzerland, China, and India to attend a team off site.

Mustafa Suleyman, MAI’s CEO, instituted these conclaves upon arriving at Microsoft just under a year ago—part of an unorthodox mass hiring in which the software behemoth absorbed most of the staff from Inflection AI, the startup Suleyman cofounded in 2022. The gatherings take place roughly once every seven weeks, and part of their purpose is unblinking self-assessment. Ahead of the meeting, around 80 squads of 6 to 15 people apiece have rated themselves on their success in hitting recent deadlines on a scale of red, amber, or green. The results aren’t great—but Suleyman sees that as progress in itself.

“It’s taken a few cycles to get people to be basically honest in terms of their scoring,” he tells me shortly after presiding over the event’s keynote presentation. “And this time, there was lots of red—like almost 45% red. I think that was a really, really good moment; and we sort of stood up and owned it. I was very proud of the team.”

Though being CEO of something called “Microsoft AI” sounds like a job of nearly unlimited purview, Suleyman does have a more specific remit. He’s charged with using AI to transform the company’s consumer properties, including the free Copilot chatbot app available on the web and in versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. The progress MAI measures in squad-size chunks all levels up to a much higher goal: building an AI companion that not only answers questions accurately but performs tasks based on a deep understanding of your needs. And not just an anodyne chatbot, but a warm and relatable persona you’ll enjoy spending time with.

In its present form, Copilot has barely begun to hint at this wildly ambitious vision. But as Microsoft pushes forward, “You’ll start to see Copilot become a platform that enables a personalized AI companion for you,” promises Suleyman. “It’ll have its own name, have its own visual representation, have its own personality, and really be your sidekick. What we are building is your second brain, your aide, your consigliere, your reliable chief of staff in your pocket.”

It’s lofty talk, but Suleyman—whose round, wire-frame glasses help give him the presence of a particularly glib owl—has a knack for explaining AI in a compelling fashion. His cautionary 2023 book on the subject, The Coming Wave, was a New York Times Best Seller; his 2024 TED talk, “What is an AI Anyway?” has been viewed 2.7 million times. More importantly, his bona fides include cofounding not just Inflection, but before that DeepMind in 2010.

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