The Microsoft AI chief began by listening to people one call at a time. Now he is trying to decide what billions of conversations with machines should be allowed to become.

A stranded would-be correspondent learned to interview Paris over a pint, then carried that curiosity through IDEO, Pinterest and Microsoft AI. Her career is a case study in choosing the less obvious door - and knowing when a title is only one part of a life.

Jared Spataro spent two decades helping Office become a service and Teams become a workplace. Now he is selling a stranger idea - software will go beyond assisting the organization and join the org chart.

Devasena Rajamohan is Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications at Microsoft, leading global teams of product managers, engineers, and data scientists driving innovation across Customer Insights, Sales, Customer Service, and Copilot. With a career spanning over two decades in enterprise CRM and cloud software—including senior leadership at SAP and early engineering roles at TATA Infotech—she has shaped how large organizations deliver AI-powered customer engagement. Under her leadership, Microsoft earned recognition as a Leader in both the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center and The Forrester Wave Customer Service Solutions Q1 2026.

Mala Anand is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Microsoft, leading the Customer Experience & Success division. A 25-year technology veteran who immigrated from Mumbai at 17 on a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship, she has shaped enterprise software at Cisco, SAP, and Microsoft, driving AI-powered transformations that measurably improve how customers get support. She is also executive sponsor of Women at Microsoft and an independent board director at Agilent Technologies.

Dux Raymond Sy is a technology executive at AvePoint, a Microsoft Regional Director, and a long-time Microsoft MVP who has spent more than two decades helping commercial, education, and public sector organizations navigate digital transformation. He is the author of 'SharePoint for Project Management,' the creator of the LinkedIn Learning course 'How to Build Your Personal Brand,' and host of the #ShiftHappens podcast. A sought-after keynote speaker, he has presented to more than 25,000 people at events worldwide including Microsoft Ignite and the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit.
Marlon Misra is the cofounder and CEO of Assembly (formerly Copilot), a Y Combinator-backed New York software company building a client-portal platform - often described as 'Shopify for service businesses.' Assembly raised a $10M Series A, serves more than 1,000 firms and roughly a million of their clients, and rebranded from Copilot in September 2025 alongside the launch of an AI assistant for professional services firms.
Douglas Pearce is Corporate Vice President of Product Management for M365 Copilot Growth at Microsoft, where he leads the strategy to bring AI-powered productivity tools to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Based in the Seattle area, he has spent over two decades at Microsoft, previously heading product management for Office Growth and Fundamentals before pivoting to spearhead the company's flagship AI copilot initiative across Microsoft 365.
James Howell is VP of Windows Marketing at Microsoft, leading the company's push to define the AI PC era. Based in Woodinville, Washington, he has been at the forefront of marketing Copilot+ PCs and positioning Windows 11 as the platform for on-device AI. He has been a key Microsoft spokesperson on the AI PC transition, championing Copilot+ as a new hardware category and appearing in press and video series including 'Innovators Powered by Best Buy' to evangelize what AI can do for everyday PC users.
Michael Schechter is Corporate Vice President of Search Growth and Experiences at Microsoft, where he has spent over two decades shaping how people discover information on the web. A computer science graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been at the center of Bing's evolution - from leading the captions feature in its early days to orchestrating the AI-powered transformation of Bing with Copilot Search. Known for his candid voice on search industry trends and his willingness to engage publicly on topics like citation transparency and AI reliability, Schechter represents the rare executive who can speak both engineer and user fluently.
Rahul Sharma is Vice President of Marketing at Microsoft, based in New Delhi, India. He leads marketing strategy and execution for one of the world's most valuable technology companies in one of its fastest-growing markets. Operating at the intersection of enterprise software, AI, and cloud computing, Sharma drives Microsoft's brand and commercial marketing efforts across India - a country Microsoft has identified as central to its global AI and cloud expansion strategy.
Takeshi Numoto is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, appointed in October 2023 after his predecessor Chris Capossela's 32-year tenure. A University of Tokyo law graduate and Stanford MBA, Numoto joined Microsoft in 1997 after serving as a trade negotiator for Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he has been the architect behind the marketing strategies that powered the explosive growth of Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365, and now leads all worldwide marketing for the company's AI-driven Copilot era — overseeing brand, advertising, product marketing, events, and communications globally.

Wendy MacGregor is Vice President of Global Media & AdTech Solutions at Microsoft Advertising, leading the company's audience and ad-technology strategy with a self-described abundance mindset borrowed from CEO Satya Nadella's 'learn-it-all' playbook. She arrived at Microsoft after a long climb through the upper ranks of digital advertising - Google, Turn, AOL - and now spends her days arguing that Copilot is an empowerment tool, not a replacement.
Eli Chait is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wholesail, a San Francisco-based B2B payment risk management platform modernizing accounts receivable for food and beverage distributors. His origin story is unusually grounded: at age 12, he was entering invoices for his father's restaurant in Los Angeles. That early hands-on encounter with the pain of paper-based B2B trade became the north star for his entire career - from co-founding Copilot (a restaurant analytics startup acquired by OpenTable) to leading Wholesail through a $22.6M Series A. With a team of repeat entrepreneurs forged at OpenTable, Wholesail is building the credit and payments network for the $1+ trillion US food distribution market.
Jacob Andreou is a tech executive who scaled Snapchat from 80 million to 363 million daily active users and $1B+ quarterly ad revenue, became one of Greylock's youngest-ever general partners at 29, and then joined Microsoft where he was elevated to EVP of Copilot in March 2026, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella and leading AI experience across consumer and commercial products.

Kevin Scott is the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft, where he has served since January 2017 under CEO Satya Nadella. A computer scientist from Gladys, Virginia, Scott rose from a working-class background to become one of the most influential technologists in the world, architecting Microsoft's landmark partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot suite, and the 'agentic web' vision. Before Microsoft, he held senior engineering roles at Google, AdMob, and LinkedIn, where he led the infrastructure overhaul known as 'Operation InVersion.' He is also a Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling author of 'Reprogramming the American Dream' (2020), which argues that AI must be harnessed to serve rural and working-class communities, not just coastal elites.

Nat Friedman is a serial founder, investor, and tech executive best known for co-founding Xamarin and serving as CEO of GitHub, where he launched Copilot. After leaving GitHub in 2021, he co-founded NFDG, a $1.1B AI venture fund with Daniel Gross, launched the Vesuvius Challenge to decode ancient scrolls using machine learning, and joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs as VP of Product and Applied Research in 2025.