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Tech Moves: Amazon Music names VP; Microsoft departures and a Copilot shakeup; Veeam adds exec

1 July 2026 at 13:08
Hrishikesh Aradhye. (Noah Berger Photo)

Hrishikesh Aradhye has joined Amazon Music as vice president of product and tech for the streaming service. He spent nearly 19 years at Google, most recently as senior director of engineering leading YouTube Music and Podcasts.

“The music industry is going through a tectonic shift that will unlock entirely new kinds of customer experiences through AI,” Aradhye said.

Earlier in his tenure there, he worked at Google Research, where he helped pioneer computer vision and machine learning systems for YouTube and Android.

Vasu Jakkal. (LinkedIn Photo)

Vasu Jakkal is stepping down after six years as Microsoft‘s corporate vice president of Security, Compliance, Identity, Management & Privacy. She thanked colleagues and customers in a LinkedIn post.

“It’s been an epic journey — six years ago, we formed our Security customer solution area and the growth and impact of Microsoft Security over these past years has been incredible as we built the #1 security business in the world while keeping our mission of building a safer world for all at the heart of it,” Jakkal wrote.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She did not indicate her next move.

Mika Yamamoto. (Veeam Photo)

Mika Yamamoto was named chief marketing and customer AI officer for Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company. It’s the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made four other executive hires or promotions this year.

Yamamoto previously worked for Seattle-area companies including F5, Microsoft and SAP, and joined Veeam from Los Angeles-based Blackline.

“She has experienced this industry from every angle — analyst, operator, executive leader — and has consistently put the customer and partner at the center of how companies operate,” CEO Anand Eswaran said in a statement.

In case you missed it, Microsoft has undergone a leadership shakeup within Copilot as the company works to turn its platform into a “super app.” Changes include:

  • Jacob Andreou has moved from corporate vice president at Microsoft AI to executive vice president of Copilot. He joined the company in 2025 from Greylock Partners and before that was at Snapchat-maker Snap.
  • Peter Sellis has been named Copilot’s lead of design, growth and engineering, reporting to Andreou. He joins Microsoft from Discord and overlapped with Andreou at Snap, where Sellis was VP of product.
  • The reshuffle also comes with a departure. Trevor O’Brien, former VP of product for M365 Copilot experiences, has resigned from his role. “The past two and a half years have been inspiring, chaotic, intense, and deeply rewarding,” O’Brien said on LinkedIn. He did not indicate his next move.
Niranjan Vijayaragavan. (LinkedIn Photo)

— Seattle-based tech executive Niranjan Vijayaragavan has taken the role of CTO at Five9, a cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service company. He joins Five9 from Nintex, where he served as chief product and technology officer. Other past employers include Avalara and Expedia Group.

“Five9 is at the center of one of the most important shifts in customer experience as AI reshapes how companies engage with their customers,” Vijayaragavan said in a statement. The company is based in San Ramon, Calif., but Vijayaragavan will remain in Washington.

Maura Mast. (LinkedIn Photo)

Maura Mast was appointed president of Seattle University, succeeding Eduardo M. Peñalver, who resigned to lead Georgetown University. Mast is the first woman and first mathematician to hold the top role at the Jesuit Catholic university.

“Our world urgently needs spaces of dialogue and discernment that actively work to heal deep divisions and build a more equitable society,” Mast said in a statement, adding that SU can lead in these areas.

Mast will begin the job on Sept. 1 and joins SU from Fordham University, where she served as a dean and mathematics professor.

Jake Gentry. (LinkedIn Photo)

— The Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator named Jake Gentry as its executive director. Gentry helped create CSAA, which aims to make the Pacific Northwest a center for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). He remains a senior director at Seattle’s Earth Finance and is leading the accelerator as part of that organization.

Hawaiian Airlines CEO Diana Birkett-Rakow praised Gentry’s appointment, saying in a statement that he has “the right combination of strategic depth, execution orientation, coalition-building instincts, and commitment to the work.”

Gentry previously held sustainability leadership roles with companies including Point B and Boeing.

— Seattle’s F5 has added Gavin Munroe to its board of directors, where he will serve on the audit and risk committees. Munroe has decades of experience in financial services and most recently was chief information officer and transformation head at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Harini Gokul, a former leader at Microsoft and AWS and past chief customer officer at Entrust, has joined the board of Afiniti. The company builds AI software for call centers that aims to match customers with the appropriate agent. Gokul also serves on the Medina City Council.

Safe Software, a data and AI enterprise integration platform based in Surrey, British Columbia, has named Nabil Lodey vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Lodey will help lead the company’s expansion in the UK and Ireland.

Allison Gruber is now VP and leader of Portland-based Cambia Health Foundation. She previously oversaw Cambia Health Solutions’ Strategy and Innovation team, where she led data-driven strategy initiatives.

— And some more folks are retiring from Microsoft, in addition to those featured Tuesday in a GeekWire story on the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program:

  • Nir Michaely, Azure software engineering manager, closes out 26 years with the company.
  • John Ballard, principal security researcher, departs after nearly 30 years.
  • Kristen Mattoni, senior product marketing manager, is leaving after 15 years.

Mary Jo Foley: What’s a consumer-focused outsider doing at the helm of Microsoft’s AI push?

29 June 2026 at 13:44
Jacob Andreou speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch, CC By 2.0)

It’s not surprising that Microsoft is looking to turn its Copilot platform into a “Super App,” given that its rivals are doing the same. But Microsoft is going about the task in a way that doesn’t follow its usual playbook, by putting a big bet on a consumer-savvy hire from the outside with some feather-ruffling ways.

The company’s newly minted Copilot Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou came to Microsoft from Greylock Partners and before that, Snapchat-maker Snap. Andreou currently oversees more than 11,000 Microsoft employees, according to a recent profile in Fortune.

Microsoft is bringing onboard another former Snap (and Discord) vice president, Peter Sellis, to help, GeekWire has learned. Sources say Sellis will be leading Copilot Design, Growth and Engineering, reporting to Andreou.

Andreou is part of a recently formed Copilot Leadership Team. His charter is to lead the “Copilot experience” by driving design, product, growth and engineering, as outlined in a March 2026 reorg memo from CEO Satya Nadella. He is one of a small group charged with shaping the future of Copilot, alongside others focused on the underlying Copilot platform and AI models.

Given Andreou’s Snap background, his plan to meld Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise Copilot experiences makes sense. It won’t be a snap, however. (See what I did there?)

Even though both share the Copilot brand, consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot don’t work the same way or use the same data sources or architecture. To boot, Microsoft hasn’t had a lot of luck with this kind of consumer-enterprise unification, as evidenced by the low interest in and uptake of its free, consumer-focused Teams product compared to its business-focused Teams collaboration offering.

The 33-year-old, Los Angeles-based Andreou seemingly is undaunted by the challenge and is pushing some employees to clock 12-hour days to keep up with younger, AI-focused companies, Fortune reports.

Microsoft was infamous for requiring employees to work long hours and weekends during crunch times leading up to delivering Windows NT and Windows 95, but not so much in recent years. Microsoft is known as a place where outsiders often struggle to thrive compared to those who climb the corporate ladder for years, making Andreou’s approach feel even riskier.

Andreou has been a big backer of the Tasks productivity layer in consumer Copilot, which is still in public preview. Tasks, which enables Copilot to handle actionable items, is similar to the recently released Copilot Cowork layer that is part of Microsoft 365 Copilot. (I asked Microsoft if the two would merge as a single Cowork-type offering at some point but was told the company had no comment.)

However, the holy grail remains the “Super App.” With the Copilot Super App, Microsoft is looking to give consumers and business users a reason to stay within Copilot regardless of the AI task with which they – or their agents – are engaging.

“Come summer, we will be bringing coding to all knowledge work within one Copilot Super App. That’s really exciting. So you’re going to have Chat, Cowork, and Code all in Copilot,” Nadella told Microsoft Build conference attendees in early June.

Microsoft isn’t the only AI-focused company working on extending its AI coding capability beyond just developers. Nor is it the only one betting on the Super App concept.

  • OpenAI is working to turn ChatGPT into a Super App that brings together ChatGPT and Codex into a single environment that operates like a personal assistant.
  • Anthropic is extending Claude to become a Super App (though it hasn’t used that terminology), as well, by creating a single environment that combines productivity, development and automation tools.

The Copilot Super App isn’t Andreou’s only focus. He tells Fortune that AI model choice and home-grown AI model excellence also are among his key priorities.

Microsoft is expanding model choice in the Copilot Cowork feature beyond Anthropic to include OpenAI and soon, Microsoft’s own Cowork 1 model – which may be based on Microsoft’s hosted version of the open-source DeepSeek model. Cowork 1 will be the newest addition to Microsoft’s growing pool of Microsoft-developed models, seven of which debuted at Build this year. Microsoft is seeking to position itself as the champion of lower cost, efficient models built for those who are token-maxxed out.

Andreou definitely has his work cut out for him as a consumer guy in a heavily enterprise-centric company.

Microsoft 365 Copilot and consumer Copilot are just two of more than two dozen different “Copilot”-branded commercial offerings available across the various Microsoft product teams, which can feel overwhelming.

Microsoft also needs to give users a clearer way to find and use the quickly expanding stable of first- and third-party agents, like the OpenClaw-based Microsoft Scout personal assistant. Will Andreou and his Super App quest bring at least some order to the Copilot and agent madness? We’ll know more sometime this summer.

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