After Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay departed Microsoft last year, the software giant quickly split his two divisions into two different teams. It was a move designed to push Windows engineers to focus on more web and AI features under Mikhail Parakhin, who was previously responsible for Bing and ads. It didn’t work out. Six months after that shake-up, Windows and Surface are back together under a new leader, following frustrations from the very top of Microsoft. The shuffling comes just as Microsoft gets ready for a big “AI PC” push. Pavan Davuluri, who’s currently in charge of Surface hardware, will now lead both Windows and Surface. Mustafa Suleyman, the DeepMind co-founder who Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just hired, will now take over the company’s consumer AI push as the CEO of Microsoft AI. The hiring of Suleyman is a key admission that something wasn’t working out with the Windows and AI shake-up from six months ago. Nadella placed Suleyman above Parakhin in Microsoft’s organization chart. Parakhin had taken on parts of Windows engineering after Panay’s departure last year, and he had been working closely on Bing Chat and several Microsoft Edge features. Parakhin’s official title was CEO of advertising and web services at Microsoft, so if he remained in his position then he would have been a CEO, reporting to the Microsoft AI CEO, who reports to the actual Microsoft CEO. That’s a lot of CEOs, and Microsoft typically reserves CEO titles for big acquisitions like LinkedIn or GitHub, or for big divisions like Microsoft Gaming. Instead, Parakhin is leaving his current position and “has decided to explore new roles” according to a Microsoft internal memo obtained by The Verge. He will report to Kevin Scott, the previous face of Microsoft’s AI efforts, during a transition phase. But it sounds like Parakhin will be leaving Microsoft soon.
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