Microsoft on Thursday named former GE finance chief Carolina Dybeck Happe as its chief operating officer, as the tech giant looks to bolster its leadership team while doubling down on artificial intelligence.
Dybeck Happe, GE’s chief financial officer from March 2020 to September 2023, was instrumental in leading the company’s turnaround. She also helped complete the spinoff of GE’s energy infrastructure unit Vernova in April 2024, after having stepped down as CFO.
She previously held CFO positions at several companies including AP Moeller – Maersk and Swedish access control and security company Assa Abloy.
The appointment comes at a time when Microsoft is aggressively pursuing leadership in the cloud services market and trying to close the gap with Amazon’s Amazon Web Services.
“In this new role, he will join the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and report directly to me,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, adding that Dybeck Happe will be crucial to accelerating “AI transformation across the company.”
SLT has been key to Microsoft’s strategic decisions, including its multi-billion-dollar investment in ChatGPT owner OpenAI, partnerships with other tech giants, and even its acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard.
“The timing of Dybeck Happe’s appointment may coincide with the implementation of lessons learned from the recent Crowdstrike outage that specifically affected Microsoft devices.
“Microsoft cannot allow this type of event to happen again,” said DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria.
Earlier this year, Microsoft tapped AI industry veteran Mustafa Suleyman to lead its AI operations and brought him into Microsoft’s leadership team. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 and now operates as its AI division.
To give investors a clearer picture of AI’s contributions to its financial statements, Microsoft last month restructured how it reports results from its business units, moving some search and news advertising revenue to its Azure cloud computing unit.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First published: September 12, 2024 | 11:46 PM IS
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