Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella has been at the helm of Microsoft as CEO since 2014, but his journey with the tech giant began much earlier. In 1993, he was a marketing manager passionately advocating for Microsoft Excel, sporting ’70s-style glasses and a full head of hair. Fast forward over three decades, and Nadella is now steering Microsoft towards the frontier of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft made a pivotal $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019, a partnership that has since expanded into a multi-billion dollar profit-sharing deal. This strategic move leveraged Microsoft’s cloud computing capabilities to support OpenAI’s ambitious AGI development goals. Demonstrating his corporate savvy, Nadella navigated a crisis in 2023 when OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was briefly dismissed by offering jobs to OpenAI’s entire team, ensuring stability and continuity.

Nadella’s strategic vision does not stop at partnerships. In recent years, he has diversified Microsoft’s AI initiatives by investing in the French AI lab Mistral and assembling a world-class team of researchers to build Microsoft’s own large language models. Nadella’s actions signal a clear ambition: to reduce reliance on external AI entities and establish Microsoft as a leader in the AI revolution.