Former Meta exec Jay Parikh to lead new Microsoft AI division

14 Jan 2025

Image: © dvoevnore/Stock.adobe.com

The company’s new division, which is currently hiring, will be led by Jay Parikh.

Microsoft yesterday (13 January) announced the establishment of a new artificial intelligence (AI) engineering group which will be led by Meta’s former engineering chief, Jay Parikh. This marks the first major engineering shakeup at the company since Parikh first joined last October.

According to a memo which was sent out by Microsoft chair and CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant’s new CoreAI – Platform and Tools division, with Parikh acting as its EVP, will focus on creating AI apps and support tools for not only Microsoft, but also its customers as well.

The new division will combine Microsoft’s Dev Div and AI Platform teams together, in addition to a number of employees from the Office of the CTO team.

Commenting further on the company’s intentions, Nadella claimed that 2025 will revolve around “model-forward applications that reshape all application categories” and added his belief that “thirty years of change is being compressed into three years”. As such, he wants Microsoft to prepare for this.

Specifically, Nadella expressed his wish for an “AI-first app stack” inside Microsoft, which would impact how its own developers would use and build AI apps and tools.

“We will build agentic applications with memory, entitlements and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes and industry domains,” Nadella elaborated. “Further, how we build, deploy and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic.”

The memo also noted that AI platform chief Eric Boyd, deputy CTO of AI infrastructure Jason Taylor, head of Microsoft’s developer division Julia Liuson, and head of developer infrastructure Tim Bozarth, along with their respective teams, will be reporting to Parikh as part of the new project.

Parikh himself also welcomed the news of his appointment in a post on LinkedIn, where he echoed Nadella’s sentiments about the state of AI technology.

He also said that Microsoft is currently hiring for “the best people that share this vision”.

Although only two weeks have passed into the new year, Microsoft is already trying to keep its finger on the pulse of AI developments. In fact, last week, the business announced a $3bn investment in India focused on cloud and AI infrastructure. The investment will be spread over the next two years and aims to establish new data centres across the country.

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Ciarán Mather is a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com