Every C-suite runs on someone. Behind every EVP with a packed calendar, a cross-continental agenda, and a thousand moving pieces, there's an executive business administrator who makes it look like physics instead of chaos. At Microsoft, that person - for the EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer - is Anne-Marie Shimozato.
Her title is a mouthful: Senior Executive Business Administrator for the EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer. But strip away the corporate nomenclature and what you have is someone who has made herself indispensable at one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet. She sits at the nerve center of Microsoft's consumer marketing operation, an $281 billion company's public-facing engine.
The consumer marketing function at Microsoft isn't a quiet corner of the business. It's the team responsible for how the world sees Windows, Surface, Xbox, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and every product touching hundreds of millions of everyday users. When the EVP in charge of that function needs her day orchestrated, her briefings prepared, her travel arranged, her stakeholder interactions coordinated - that's Shimozato's work.
It's not a support role. It's an organizational multiplier. And in Seattle's technology ecosystem, where execution speed separates the good from the great, the best executive business administrators don't manage schedules - they manage leverage.