Update, 10/28: Microsoft’s Azure cloud business brought in $33.2 billion in revenue in the September quarter, up 48% from a year earlier, blowing past the company’s own forecast and beating Wall Street’s expectations. Read the full story.

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Microsoft’s earnings report Wednesday will come two days after the company offered buyouts to about 60,000 people, roughly a quarter of its employees. The call gives executives their first chance to say what the offer will cost, and to explain how it fits with the company’s long-term view of its workforce.

Whether or not they go into those details, it’s one of several issues to watch in Wednesday’s report, the first under Microsoft’s new reporting structure. Anthropic’s IPO filing on Monday adds another storyline, showing how much the Claude maker has agreed to spend on Microsoft’s cloud.

Coming into the report, Microsoft’s stock is near its high. Microsoft closed Monday at $532.60, about 2% below its record close of $543.45 on Oct. 13, after gaining roughly $1.4 trillion in market value since late June.

Here are the key numbers and issues heading into Microsoft’s results for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, ended Sept. 30.

Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of $90.75 billion, up nearly 17% from a year ago, and earnings of $4.72 per share, up 14%, according to Yahoo Finance. Microsoft’s own forecast was $89.85 billion to $90.95 billion, so Wall Street is looking for a result near the top of that range.

In July, Microsoft reported $90 billion in revenue for the June quarter, well above the $87.7 billion analysts expected.

A new scorecard: Microsoft announced in September that it would sort its business into two groups instead of the three it had used since 2015. This is the first quarter under the new setup.

The first, dubbed Agents and Infra, includes Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, LinkedIn’s recruiting and sales tools, and server and productivity licensing. It brought in 81% of Microsoft’s revenue and 88% of its operating income in fiscal 2026, based on figures Microsoft recast under the new structure.

Microsoft expects Agents and Infra revenue of $75.15 billion to $75.75 billion this quarter, which would be growth of about 22% to 23%, by GeekWire’s calculation.

The other group, Devices and Consumer, includes Windows, Xbox and search advertising. Microsoft expects it to bring in $14.7 billion to $15.2 billion, down 5% to 8% from a year earlier.

Azure, in dollars: Microsoft started disclosing Azure’s annual revenue last year, when it passed $75 billion, and topped $100 billion in fiscal 2026. Starting this quarter, it reports the figure every quarter. It also changed what counts as Azure: GitHub’s cloud business and Security Copilot now fall under Microsoft 365, and its healthcare cloud moved to a new industry unit.

Counted that way, Azure brought in $29.4 billion in the June quarter, up 42%. Microsoft expects growth of 44% to 45% this quarter, not counting currency fluctuations, which would put Azure at roughly $32 billion, by GeekWire’s calculation. That compares with the roughly 45% Microsoft projected in July, under the old definition.

Hitting that forecast may not be enough. Investors are looking for about 46%, BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski wrote in a note Monday. In January, Azure beat Microsoft’s own forecast and the stock still fell 10%, because investors had privately expected more.

“Azure moves the stock, but the read that matters is whether capacity is absorbed as fast as it lands,” wrote Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives in a note last week.

Capital spending: Microsoft expects capital expenditures of more than $50 billion for the quarter, which would be a record. That’s up from $41 billion in the June quarter and $34.9 billion a year earlier.

An accounting change reduces what Microsoft reports as capital spending, without reducing its planned investment. Microsoft now assumes its data center buildings will last 25 years instead of 15. As a result, more of its data center leases will be classified in a way that doesn’t count as capital spending, CFO Amy Hood said on the July earnings call.

That change alone lowered Microsoft’s capital spending estimate for calendar 2026 to about $175 billion, from the roughly $190 billion it projected in April. Hood said the company’s actual spending plans hadn’t changed.

Cloud margins: Microsoft Cloud gross margin came in at 65% last quarter, better than expected but down from a year earlier. Microsoft said it expects the figure to be relatively stable this quarter. It also expects operating margins to be roughly flat with a year ago.

Workforce: The new “voluntary exit” offer, announced Monday by Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, covers participating teams in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India. It has no age or tenure requirement and extends to some vice presidents. Employees have until the first week of December to decide, and Microsoft hasn’t said how much the offer will cost or when it will record the charge.

For the spring retirement program, Hood disclosed the cost on the April earnings call: about $900 million, with roughly $350 million in cost of revenue and $550 million in operating expenses. The charge showed up in the following quarter. About 30% of the 8,750 eligible employees accepted.

The new offer is less generous. It matches Microsoft’s standard severance, without the extended healthcare of the spring program, and the company expects a much smaller share of people to take it. But the pool of eligible employees is nearly seven times larger.

Microsoft says the offer doesn’t mean it needs fewer people. Coleman said in July that the company was studying whether to make voluntary exits a regular part of managing its workforce. It has told investors to expect operating margins roughly flat this quarter and down less than a point for the full fiscal year, even with record capital spending.

Nadella has addressed this before. In a July 2025 memo to employees, after Microsoft laid off about 15,000 people, he acknowledged the “uncertainty and seeming incongruence” of thriving financially while cutting jobs. “This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he wrote.

In his annual shareholder letter last week, he focused on Microsoft’s spending on AI infrastructure. “Based on the demand we see and the efficiencies we are driving, I am confident in the long-term returns on our investments,” Nadella wrote. “We are building against a growing book of business tied to this secular shift.”

Microsoft had about 223,000 employees as of June 30, before it cut 4,800 jobs in July and more in September. The Information reported this month that Azure President Girish Bablani told leaders in his group to find ways to cut costs by at least 20%. Microsoft called the report inaccurate and said Azure leadership had not directed teams to develop cost-cutting plans.

Copilot: Microsoft said in July that businesses were paying for more than 30 million Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, up from 20 million in April. That’s still only about 7% of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats.

The bigger change is in how Microsoft charges for Copilot and its other AI tools. In July it added usage-based billing alongside per-seat pricing. It’s also pushing customers toward E7, a new premium bundle that includes Copilot. Microsoft expects Microsoft 365 commercial cloud revenue to grow about 17% this quarter, not counting currency swings, a number that now includes GitHub.

The BNP Paribas analyst Slowinski, who attended Microsoft’s Frontier Tour event in London last week, wrote that partners are seeing more customers roll out Copilot company-wide. Partners also told him that Microsoft now ties 35% of E7 sales incentives to how much customers use features like Cowork.

Anthropic and OpenAI: Anthropic’s S-1 filing shows the company has committed to spend at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft from November 2026 to May 2033, up from the $30 billion Azure commitment announced last November. That’s well below its minimum commitments to Amazon ($110 billion) and Google ($114.5 billion).

Microsoft agreed last year to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. Its results for the June quarter included a $3.2 billion gain on that investment.

OpenAI remains the bigger factor. Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligation (RPO), the measure of signed contracts it hasn’t yet delivered on, reached $678 billion last quarter, up 84% from a year earlier. Without OpenAI, the backlog grew 25%. OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue approached $50 billion at the end of September, The Information reported, lower than earlier reports of about $70 billion.

Windows: Microsoft expects revenue from Windows licenses sold to PC makers, along with its own devices, to fall a little more than 20%. Higher memory prices are making PCs more expensive, and PC makers are still working through extra inventory.

What’s next: Alphabet also reports Wednesday afternoon, and Amazon reports Thursday, setting up a side-by-side look at Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.

Anthropic is aiming to go public the week of Nov. 16, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Check back Wednesday afternoon for coverage.

Microsoft Copilot Notebooks turns project files into working drafts. Check feature access, source accuracy, sharing permissions, and review time before adoption.

The post Copilot Notebooks Turns Project Files Into Drafts: What to Check appeared first on TechRepublic.

Microsoft Copilot Notebooks turns project files into working drafts. Check feature access, source accuracy, sharing permissions, and review time before adoption.

The post Copilot Notebooks Turns Project Files Into Drafts: What to Check appeared first on TechRepublic.

Swedish Government Offices block direct ChatGPT and Claude access but retain Copilot. Learn what the restrictions mean for workplace AI security policies.

The post Swedish Government Offices Block ChatGPT, Claude; Keep Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.

Swedish Government Offices block direct ChatGPT and Claude access but retain Copilot. Learn what the restrictions mean for workplace AI security policies.

The post Swedish Government Offices Block ChatGPT, Claude; Keep Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.

When Stripe co-founder John Collison interviewed Satya Nadella on his company’s podcast last fall, he asked the Microsoft CEO for advice on building a platform business. Collison will soon get to see how Microsoft does it up close.

Collison, 36, the co-founder and president of the Bay Area-based payments platform, has been nominated to Microsoft’s board, the tech giant disclosed Wednesday in its annual proxy statement.

He would fill one of two board seats opening up at Microsoft’s Dec. 8 annual meeting. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said in June that he would leave, and the proxy reveals that Disney CFO Hugh Johnston, who chairs the board’s audit committee, is not seeking re-election either. Both have served on the board since 2017.

The proxy also notes that former EY CEO Carmine Di Sibio, appointed to the board in May, will stand for election by shareholders for the first time.

Microsoft’s board currently has 13 members, including Di Sibio. With Hoffman and Johnston leaving and Collison joining, it will go back to 12, the same number it had before Di Sibio joined in May.

Microsoft says Collison “brings extensive entrepreneurial and operational experience, along with deep expertise in technology.” He started Stripe with his brother, Patrick, in 2010, and businesses using Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025. Collison does not sit on any other public company board.

The board determined that he is independent, after considering ordinary business dealings between Microsoft and companies tied to its directors. The proxy doesn’t mention any business between Microsoft and Stripe, but the two companies already work together.

Stripe helps power Copilot Checkout, which Microsoft launched in January to let U.S. users of its AI assistant buy from Etsy sellers and other retailers without leaving the chat. In 2023, the companies teamed up to let businesses take card payments for paid events in Microsoft Teams.

The companies’ work together came up in the November episode of Stripe’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. Collison said Stripe was building a platform business in agentic commerce, in which AI agents shop and pay on behalf of people, and asked Nadella what advice he had for a company building in such an early market.

Nadella said the key would be making it simple for small merchants to sell through AI agents, without asking them to set up servers or adopt a string of new technical protocols themselves.

The relationship goes back years. Nadella said he first visited Stripe’s San Francisco office when he was running Microsoft’s cloud business, before he became CEO.

He said Stripe reminded Microsoft of something it had once been good at, “following the developer, being where the startups are,” and said that thinking “led me even to GitHub,” the code-sharing platform Microsoft acquired in 2018 for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft will remove eight OneDrive Copilot shortcuts from File Explorer starting in November 2026, changing how users access AI-powered file tools.

The post Microsoft Is Removing 8 Copilot Shortcuts From File Explorer — Here’s What Stays appeared first on TechRepublic.

Microsoft will remove eight OneDrive Copilot shortcuts from File Explorer starting in November 2026, changing how users access AI-powered file tools.

The post Microsoft Is Removing 8 Copilot Shortcuts From File Explorer — Here’s What Stays appeared first on TechRepublic.

In less than four months, Microsoft has added roughly half an Amazon to its market value.

The tech giant’s stock has gained about $1.4 trillion in value since early summer, rising from $352.83 on June 25, its lowest close in more than a year, to a record close of $543.45 on Tuesday, giving it a market value just above $4 trillion. The increase over that period is nearly as much as Tesla is worth.

As stock turnarounds go, it’s extraordinary. In January, Microsoft lost $357 billion in a single day, the biggest one-day drop in its history, as investors worried about the company’s AI spending and its reliance on OpenAI. By midsummer, Microsoft was the worst performer this year among the big tech stocks known as the “Magnificent Seven,” according to Morningstar.

The rebound accelerated in late July, when Microsoft reported that Azure, its cloud platform, grew 43% and topped $100 billion in annual revenue. The stock jumped 15.5% the next day. It has mostly kept climbing since, as Microsoft rolled out a revamped Copilot app, a new AI push for Windows and new AI chips.

Microsoft isn’t rising alone. The broader stock market has also been hitting record highs, led by AI stocks. The S&P 500 closed above 7,800 for the first time last week, even as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since 2002.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been making a broader pitch along the way. In an essay posted on X in July, he warned that companies relying on outside AI labs “pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable,” meaning their own knowledge.

He urged businesses to keep control of that knowledge and avoid tying themselves to any one AI model. Microsoft sells access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, along with its own.

Last weekend, he took up a related theme, calling on X for an “emergency brake” on advanced AI models. That means “separating the model from the harness that orchestrates its work,” he wrote. “We must assume a model is compromised and contain it from the start.”

The message also fits Microsoft’s business interests. As companies use AI models from multiple providers, the advantage could shift to companies like Microsoft that run the cloud and workplace software where businesses keep their data.

Microsoft reports its next quarterly results Oct. 28.

GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5” era.

A delicate dance: In August 2025, Microsoft moved to integrate GitHub into the mothership, under its CoreAI division, after having allowed it to run as a quasi-independent entity since acquiring it in 2018. At the same time, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced he would leave the company at the end of the year.

A number of developers feared the worst: GitHub would become just another arm of Microsoft and lose the community-mindedness that had made it attractive to developers of all stripes, and especially open-source ones.

GitHub Chief Operating Officer Kyle Daigle — a 13-plus-year GitHub veteran — had been one of the main champions of the need to “keep GitHub GitHub.” He maintained that stance even after he added the “Chief Marketing Officer of Developer” title for all of Microsoft to his COO role in January 2026.

So, how has Microsoft done this past year with managing GitHub? In an interview with GeekWire, Daigle acknowledged that GitHub’s relationship with Microsoft has changed since the end of the standalone CEO era. But the goal is no longer just “don’t break GitHub.” It’s to export GitHub’s community, developer-first ethos and learnings across Microsoft.

GitHub has influence beyond just the GitHub product set now, Daigle said. And the fact that Microsoft opted to consolidate its developer-facing messaging and community outreach under Daigle, someone who came from GitHub, not from Microsoft’s traditional DevDiv organization, gives weight to his claim.

“Bringing teams together — engineering teams and marketing teams and everyone that wasn’t talking to each other before — has been a really big part of the work,” Daigle said. “I see all these opportunities for GitHub to directly help and impact the overall mission of Microsoft versus keeping it cloistered in a way that isn’t helping either GitHub’s mission or Microsoft’s mission.”

These days, developer teams across Microsoft and GitHub are sharing foundations and the GitHub Copilot software development kit across organizations “in a way that would have seemed improbable before,” he said.

As Microsoft historians know, “Microsoft’s challenge isn’t creating products. It’s connecting them,” Daigle said.

Growing pains: At the same time, the rise of AI agents has strained GitHub’s infrastructure. Over the past few months, GitHub has experienced some significant outages, including one in August that lasted nearly eight hours.

GitHub officials have said they are migrating from their own datacenters to Azure to try to ease some of the capacity issues. Daigle said it’s not a simple lift-and-shift process; rather, it’s a major re-architecture for the platform.

GitHub is roughly 60% through its Azure migration as of early October, he said.

It’s working with Azure storage teams on separating compute and storage for the Git distributed version control system to help alleviate bottlenecks caused by developers and agents working concurrently in the same repositories. Developers and agents made 7.38 billion commits on GitHub in September alone, according to the company.

GitHub’s recent growth would not have been manageable without Microsoft scaling expertise and Azure support, Daigle said. GitHub is in a unique position of being able to request major additional capacity, such as millions of CPUs, and work with Microsoft teams to provision it, he said.

The GitHub app and agent store: GitHub got its start as a platform for source control and collaboration. But its role is evolving as part of its Microsoft integration. In addition to developing and supporting Microsoft’s most successful Copilot, GitHub Copilot, GitHub has an important place in Microsoft’s agent-centric strategy.

GitHub is becoming “the store for anything that needs to be coded and needs some verification,” Daigle said. “We’ll connect you to whatever the right tool inside of Microsoft is for you to run that or whatever tool you’re using, not just (from) the Microsoft product suite.”

In the new world order, GitHub isn’t just the store for apps. Increasingly, it’s also the store for agents, which means GitHub is acting as the developer layer for Microsoft’s “agent factory” strategy.

(Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates envisioned Microsoft as a “software factory” that could produce software at scale. These days, CEO Satya Nadella and team talk about Microsoft as an “agent factory,” helping customers create agents at scale.)

GitHub currently serves more than 200 million developers, plus an unknown but quickly growing number of agents.

Developers need to be thinking in new ways when it comes to agents, Daigle said. They need to consider ideas such as scaling application programming interfaces (APIs) for agents separately from humans, creating APIs designed specifically for agents, rewriting documentation and tooling so agents can consume GitHub efficiently, and treating agent access as a fundamentally different workload from human access.

In the longer term, Daigle said he expects AI to make software economically viable for smaller audiences, such as a family, an individual or a single team. The app-store model may change substantially in the coming years, as people create highly specialized applications. GitHub could help like-minded users discover software for specific interests, such as a narrowly focused household or community use case.

GitHub historically has considered anyone who has seen or touched code to be part of the developer community. Daigle’s vision is for GitHub and Microsoft to let both professional developers and newer builders create and run software and agents without needing to manage token costs, uptime, monitoring or operational overhead.

GitHub will have more to say about its plans at the GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco, Oct. 28-29. The event won’t focus on code generation alone; it will include information on tools covering the full lifecycle, proactive security approaches and how to determine whether software is working well after deployment.

“We’re looking to solve the core parts of the platform, like Git, like Actions, in a way that I hope will make people excited and feel like they can absolutely trust GitHub for the next decade to come,” Daigle said.

Microsoft is turning to an old friend and a familiar advantage in search of a new edge in AI.

The company and its longtime partner Nvidia on Wednesday started taking orders for a new line of high-end Windows PCs built to run large AI models independent of the cloud.

Microsoft also announced what it calls “Windows Hybrid Intelligence,” a set of features that will let its Copilot assistant read the files on a PC, take actions on the machine and opt to run AI models locally instead of in the cloud when it makes sense.

It’s not a new concept to users of such programs as Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and OpenClaw, which already work with the files on a user’s computer. But only Microsoft can build the features into Windows itself, along with security controls that limit what an AI agent can reach on the machine and will keep a separate record of what the agent does.

“I think agents are going to be the largest users of the file system,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during an on-stage conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at an event in San Francisco.

Microsoft got an early jump in AI with its 2019 investment in OpenAI and the 2021 debut of GitHub Copilot, its AI coding assistant. But its Copilot products for consumers and businesses have since been overshadowed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Both rivals also moved quickly on AI agents that write code and carry out other tasks on a user’s computer, the kind of software Microsoft is now building into Windows. Microsoft’s own Copilot Cowork, which it introduced in March, integrates Anthropic’s Claude.

The tech giant has been reworking Copilot to catch up. Earlier this year, it put its Copilot teams for consumers and businesses under Jacob Andreou, now its executive vice president of Copilot. Last month, it released a new version of the app with tools for coding and long-running tasks.

Where Copilot is headed: Windows Hybrid Intelligence gives Copilot three new capabilities, as Andreou described them on stage. The assistant can draw on all the files on a PC, take actions such as moving files and changing settings, and hand tasks to AI models running on the machine “when cost or privacy matter more.”

Copilot will still use the cloud for the hardest tasks, Andreou said, and will act on the PC only with the user’s permission.

Microsoft said the features are expected to begin rolling out in the coming months on Copilot+ PCs, the AI-focused Windows machines it introduced in 2024.

Developers will get a version first. An experimental release coming later this month will let GitHub Copilot automatically send simpler coding tasks to an AI model on the PC and harder ones to the cloud.

In one example depicted on stage, Copilot’s Autopilot agent found an email from Andreou’s accountant, gathered tax documents scattered across his PC, renamed and sorted them into folders, bundled them into a zip file and drafted a reply with it attached, pausing for his approval before sending. The sorting was handled by AI models on the laptop, he said, so the tax details weren’t sent to the cloud.

Running AI models on the PC reduces the usage charges that come with AI in the cloud. Nadella wrote on X that Microsoft is bringing “unmetered intelligence to every desk and every home,” echoing the company’s original mission of “a computer on every desk and in every home.” A slide in the presentation said local models would run tasks on the PC “at no extra cost.”

Microsoft is also adding thousands of quick actions to the search box on the Windows 11 taskbar, such as switching to dark mode, arranging windows or sending a text message. Those start rolling out Wednesday to people in the Windows Insider testing program.

An option to get Copilot answers in the search box will be opt-in and will arrive in select markets later this year, according to the company.

The Recall precedent: Microsoft has run into trouble before with AI that looks at what’s on a PC. Recall, a feature that takes periodic screenshots of a user’s activity to make it searchable, drew objections from security researchers when it was announced in 2024. Microsoft delayed it and made it opt-in before releasing it widely in 2025.

Recall didn’t come up at Wednesday’s event. Microsoft’s blog post says Copilot’s access to local content, which it describes as “files and recent activity,” will require the user’s permission.

Limits on AI agents: Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said the AI agents that run on PCs today are “fundamentally insecure because they have broad system access.”

Microsoft’s answer is a technology called Microsoft Execution Containers, now generally available in Windows 11, which lets an organization set which files and networks an AI agent can reach. Microsoft said OpenAI’s Codex and OpenClaw already support it, and that Anthropic’s Claude Code and Perplexity plan to.

Meta’s Muse agent is coming to Windows as an app that uses the technology, as well.

The new PCs: The machines are built around Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip and aimed at developers and creative professionals who want to run large AI models on their own computers.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch laptop with up to 128GB of memory, starts at $2,599 and will be available Oct. 16, the same day similar laptops from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI begin shipping.

A desktop version for developers, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, costs $5,999 and ships in the U.S. in November.

Microsoft is pitching the laptops against Apple. It says machines with the Nvidia chip start producing AI responses up to 2.1 times faster than a 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple’s M5 Pro chip and generate AI images up to 4.3 times faster, citing tests it commissioned or that Nvidia ran on preproduction machines.

The company is also offering up to $1,000 back to buyers who trade in a MacBook Pro.

Huang said the chip took more than 4,000 engineering years and started with a conversation he had with Nadella four years ago.

Nvidia’s Windows roots: Sriram Krishnan, the venture capitalist and former White House AI advisor who moderated the conversation, asked Huang for a favorite memory of working with Microsoft. Huang said Nvidia owes its existence to Windows.

He recalled a moment in late 1992, when Windows 3.1 was new and he and his co-founders, who had worked mostly on workstations, started imagining a PC with 3D graphics that could run games and design software. They started the company the next year.

“If not for Windows, Nvidia wouldn’t have been founded,” Huang said.

He traced a line from there to the AI boom. Windows brought graphics chips to the PC, he said, which led to Nvidia’s GeForce chips and its CUDA software, which gave AI researchers the computers they needed for deep learning.

Nadella joked that Huang was “now going to do a little transfer of market cap back to me.” Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, at about $5.8 trillion. Microsoft is worth about $3.9 trillion.

“Windows has been with me for 34 years,” Huang said at the end of the conversation. “Looks like it’s going to be with me for 34 more.”

“There you go,” Nadella added before they walked off the stage.

A longtime Microsoft engineering leader who was previously a Copilot chief technology officer is joining Amazon Web Services to work on its competing AI tools for coding and workplace productivity.

Pedram Rezaei, a nearly 20-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently a corporate vice president on the Microsoft Superintelligence team, starts Monday as a distinguished engineer in the AWS Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization, led by Swami Sivasubramanian.

Rezaei will work initially on Kiro, the AWS coding tool, and Quick, Amazon’s AI assistant for workplace tasks, Sivasubramanian wrote in a memo to his team Monday. “He is a hands-on engineer who is still in the code every day, and he plans to keep it that way here,” he added.

Kiro’s user count doubled from the first quarter to the second, and monthly AI users for Quick grew fourfold, according to the memo. Rezaei’s plan for his first few months is to “meet people, learn how things work here, and ship something real,” Sivasubramanian wrote.

Sivasubramanian’s organization was expanded in July to include emerging technologies, part of a broader reshuffling of Amazon’s AI teams.

The hire comes as Amazon and Microsoft compete more directly in AI tools for work. Microsoft last month unveiled an all-in-one Copilot app that combines chat, coding and agents, its answer to OpenAI and Anthropic. Amazon made its Quick desktop app generally available in September and brought its main features to mobile.

Rezaei joined Microsoft in 2006 and held senior technical roles on Power BI, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Bing and Azure Maps before moving to Copilot, according to his LinkedIn profile. He became Copilot’s CTO in February and moved to the Microsoft Superintelligence team in June, according to the profile. Sivasubramanian’s memo said Rezaei was most recently working on training foundation models.

We’ve contacted Microsoft for comment on his departure.

Rezaei is the latest Microsoft executive to move to AWS this year. Shawn Bice returned to AWS in May from a security role at Microsoft to lead its Automated Reasoning Group.

In his memo Monday, Sivasubramanian also told his team that two longtime AWS engineers, Marvin Theimer and Reto Kramer, have returned to work on neurosymbolic AI and automated reasoning, which he called “one of our biggest bets for the future.” Both came back from Microsoft, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Neurosymbolic AI pairs large language models with rule-based systems that can check whether an AI agent is following a company’s policies and procedures.

Speaking at Madrona’s IA40 Summit in Seattle last week, Sivasubramanian said nearly every CIO and CEO raises the same question about AI agents. “How do I know it is always going to obey all my rules and regulations?” he said. “This is a real concern.”

Solving that problem “actually unlocks so many use cases for all these enterprises,” he added.

Theimer, an AWS distinguished engineer for nine years before leaving in 2022, joined Microsoft in July 2024 as a corporate vice president and technical architect and stayed until March. It was his second stint at the company, where he worked from 1998 to 2006. He rejoined AWS in July as a vice president and distinguished engineer.

Kramer, who led an automated reasoning team at AWS before leaving in 2023, joined Microsoft in September 2025 as vice president of Security Platform & AI and stayed until May. He rejoined AWS in September as vice president of applied science.

Sivasubramanian hinted at more hires to come, writing that Rezaei joins “as we continue to build out our technical leadership team to help take on the ambitious work we have planned.”

Ture Armas has been encouraging JPMorganChase engineers, from Seattle to India, to rethink their approach to the job as AI changes how software gets built.

Armas, the new leader of the bank’s Seattle Tech Center, said in an interview that engineers will need to work more closely with the business, model its problems and communicate clearly, rather than waiting for a business analyst to hand them fully written requirements.

“Things that we in the past referred to as soft skills, they are now the hard skills,” Armas said, explaining that it’s changing how the bank hires. “You do need to interview for that.”

Lori Beer, JPMorganChase’s global chief information officer, named Armas to the Seattle role in July. He succeeded Mamtha Banerjee, who left the bank in March. Armas also continues in his day job as CTO and head of Commercial Bank Lending Technology.

How the job is changing: In his view, the traditional handoff from a business analyst, with wireframes and acceptance tests spelled out, is giving way to spec-driven development, in which engineers write the specifications that AI coding tools work from.

That puts a premium on skills such as modeling the business domain and working directly with business teams, much like the forward-deployed engineers that have become common in the AI industry. “We are moving towards that,” he said.

He gave the same advice to his teams in India on a recent visit, telling them to get embedded in the business and “fall in love with the business problem.”

Most developers at the Seattle center use GitHub Copilot, Armas said, while Anthropic’s Claude Code is in use on smaller teams.

On the bank’s July 14 earnings call, CEO Jamie Dimon said JPMorganChase has almost 1,000 AI use cases, about 50 of them significant, in areas including risk, fraud, marketing and document reading. He said the bank has “had discrete areas where we did reduce jobs by 30% or 40%,” and that “most of those people were offered jobs elsewhere.”

“We are preparing to make sure we can retrain our people,” Dimon said, predicting the change will be faster and more dramatic than past waves of automation.

A bigger footprint: The Seattle Tech Center has more than 400 people and about 50 open positions, mostly in AI, cloud and cybersecurity, said Kristine Baker, a JPMorganChase vice president who manages the Seattle Tech Center.

The team finished moving this summer into expanded space in the downtown Seattle skyscraper now called the JPMorganChase Center, formerly the Russell Investments Center. The bank occupies five floors in the building. Tech fills all of the 14th floor, the largest, with more technologists on two other floors.

The move brings the tech center back to where it started.

JPMorganChase opened the Seattle center in 2018 on a single floor of what was then the Russell Investments Center, led by Todd Hrycenko, a security executive who joined the bank from Salesforce. A year later, with about 100 people, it signed a lease at 1201 Third Ave., the former Washington Mutual Tower across the street.

The center grew to more than 320 people by 2023 under Rao Lakkakula, and to 380 by early 2025, when Banerjee took over after Lakkakula left for Microsoft.

Site leadership: Armas said he spends about 95% of his time on his lending technology job, and he credited Baker with running the tech center day to day. The lead role rotates among senior executives, and Baker has provided continuity through the changes in leadership.

“She shepherds each one of us along,” Armas said.

Baker joined JPMorganChase in 2023 from Amazon Web Services, where she led a program to build AWS teams at new U.S. locations, after 14 years at Western Washington University. She also works with the bank’s global program of about two dozen tech centers.

Armas, whose first name is pronounced too-RAY, grew up in British Columbia and studied computer science at the University of British Columbia. He worked in New York for about 18 years before moving to Seattle in 2016 to lead technology for the bank’s commercial real estate lending business, which has deep roots in Washington Mutual’s Seattle operations.

Seattle’s talent pool: Armas cited Seattle’s depth of talent in AI, cloud and cybersecurity engineering — noting, for example, that vets from Amazon and other local tech companies have moved into senior technology roles at the bank.

Beer, the bank’s CIO, said in a July interview that Seattle is one of the key hubs for a new AI software infrastructure team to help JPMC manage AI workloads across its own data centers and outside cloud providers, with the goals of controlling costs and avoiding lock-in to any one AI vendor.

The competition for engineers has eased since the hiring rush of the pandemic years. The bank is now getting “lots of responses to every position,” Armas said.

Asked about Seattle’s JumpStart payroll tax, which other business leaders have said discourages hiring in the city, Armas said there are no plans to change course from where the bank is now, in downtown Seattle.

Inside the office: The new tech floor in the JPMorganChase Center has become a draw for the rest of the bank. Armas said bankers regularly come up to the 14th floor, and when he asked some of them why, they told him the breakout room is the best in the building.

Desks on the floor aren’t assigned. They’re grouped into “neighborhoods” by line of business, including one for the bank’s AI and data organization, with lockers for personal belongings. Small rooms with doors line the floor for private calls, white noise keeps the open areas quiet, and windows look out over the city. There’s a prayer room and a mother’s room.

A game room with a ping-pong table sits behind an easy-to-miss door. Some employees have used it for DJ sessions, strobe lights included.

What’s next: The site lead role typically rotates every couple of years. Armas, who has been part of the conversations about a Seattle tech center since he arrived in 2016, said his goal over his tenure is to connect the center’s engineers with teams across the bank and the business problems the bank needs to solve.

Charles Lamanna, the Microsoft executive who oversees Microsoft 365 and the platform behind Copilot, says most business software will end up running behind AI agents rather than in front of users. That’s bad news for a lot of apps.

“If my agent interacts with your app exclusively, the agent’s your customer, not the end user,” Lamanna said Wednesday morning, speaking with Madrona’s Matt McIlwain in the opening keynote at the venture capital firm’s annual IA40 Summit in Seattle. “And agents are very harsh customers.”

Agents will pick whatever service is cheapest, fastest and most reliable, he said, and they’ll move people to another one quickly. Apps that sit behind agents will have a hard time holding on to pricing power or customer loyalty.

Lamanna splits software into two groups.

• “Thick” apps are where people spend most of their workweek, such as CAD programs, contact-center software, or Excel for a full-time financial modeler.
• “Thin” apps are the ones people drop into and leave. He said that describes the vast majority of business software, and those apps will end up running “headless,” with AI assistants such as Copilot and ChatGPT doing the work through the back end.

Microsoft’s own apps aren’t exempt. Word, Excel and PowerPoint won’t go away, Lamanna said, but most people will use them inside Copilot, which can now run Office without switching apps. In his view, the standard setup for an office worker ends up as Copilot for AI and Teams for communication, “and that’s maybe it.”

He compared a headless app to a company that sells only on Amazon. It can be a business, he said, but prices get squeezed when buyers are simply choosing between “your pencils or those pencils.” A brand such as Nike has more leverage.

Amazon itself is resisting that role. Earlier this week it blocked Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on its site, saying Meta never asked permission and that the agent doesn’t identify itself and appears to store customer credentials. Meta has said Muse can’t see users’ passwords or payment methods. Amazon is also in a legal fight with Perplexity over that company’s Comet shopping agent.

Amazon is open to agents on its own terms. Days after blocking Muse, it opened its seller tools to Anthropic’s Claude, letting merchants manage inventory, prices and listings without going into Seller Central.

Lamanna brought up Muse himself onstage, predicting it will reach far more people than work-focused agent tools such as Copilot and Claude Cowork.

Microsoft is on the other side of the same question. Copilot depends on other companies’ software being willing to work behind it. In an August profile, Lamanna said Copilot uses connectors to pull data from services such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, so people don’t have to leave the app.

Microsoft on Friday morning unveiled its long-promised Copilot “super app” — without officially calling it that — combining AI chat, coding and long-running agents into a unified app for business and personal use.

The new version of the Copilot app adds sections called Home, which combines chat with Microsoft’s Cowork agent; Code, which lets people build their own apps and tools by describing them; and Autopilot, where people can set up their own always-on AI agents.

It also brings full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside Copilot, so people can create and edit documents with AI and their co-workers without switching apps.

The announcement is Microsoft’s answer to OpenAI and Anthropic, which have been combining chat, coding and agents in their own apps and selling them directly to businesses that have long been Microsoft’s core customers. Microsoft also uses models from both companies in Copilot, alongside its own.

Partners and rivals: Microsoft executives contrasted the company’s approach with OpenAI and Anthropic during an event Wednesday, according to a transcript provided by Microsoft. The pitch is aimed at corporate IT departments, which have long relied on Microsoft for security and compliance.

Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president who leads Copilot, said Microsoft knew that “unlike a lot of our competition, sending your most sensitive files down to a local machine into a VM was a complete nonstarter” — an apparent reference to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, which runs in a virtual machine on the user’s computer.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pitched Copilot as a hedge against relying on any one AI lab, saying companies should be able to test models against their own benchmarks and swap one out for another.

“My test of true independence going forward is for you to have a private eval that you can hill climb on and substitute a model,” he said. Translation: a “private eval” is a company’s own set of tests for AI models, and “hill climb” is a phrase in vogue in AI circles for steadily improving results against those tests.

A company that can’t do those things, he added, has effectively handed the knowledge it builds with AI “to somebody else.”

Model choice: Microsoft also emphasized the ability to switch between AI models from different companies. A menu shown during the presentation let users pick OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Opus, or an Auto mode that chooses a model for each request.

Microsoft also showed its own MAI models alongside OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI on one of Nadella’s slides, although they weren’t listed in the menu shown during the demo.

The rollout: Nadella first promised the super app at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in June, saying that “come summer” the company would bring “coding to all knowledge work within one Copilot super app.” On Microsoft’s July 29 earnings call, he told investors it would arrive “this quarter,” which ends Sept. 30.

Friday’s announcement meets that deadline with less than a week to spare, and most of the new features won’t be widely available until later.

• Code, already in the hands of a few customers in Microsoft’s Frontier early-access program, rolls out more widely to the program at the end of the month, with broad availability in the coming weeks and a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
• Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. Office in Copilot will roll out to consumers and Frontier customers in the coming weeks.

Office inside Copilot: Copilot has long run inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now the full apps also run inside Copilot. “This is not just some simplified viewer,” Andreou said.

In a demo, a Microsoft product manager had Copilot pull data into an Excel workbook, accepted her team’s tracked changes in a Word document, and then had Copilot turn both into a PowerPoint deck without leaving the app. Co-workers can edit the same files at the same time from the regular Office apps, according to Microsoft.

How it’s priced: Copilot now has two ways to pay. A per-user monthly license covers everyday uses such as chat and Copilot features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. More intensive agent work, including Cowork, Code and Autopilot, is billed based on usage, as are the newest frontier models, OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Claude Fable.

“Our view is that there are two kinds of AI at work,” said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work, in a recorded briefing for media. “They call for two very different ways of paying, and Copilot offers both.”

Consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions will also add usage-based billing later this year for Cowork, Code and other new features, Spataro said.

Nadella told investors in July that Microsoft is evolving its business model “beyond per-seat to per-seat-plus-consumption.” Usage-based services are off by default, and administrators can set spending limits for an entire company, specific groups or individual users through Microsoft’s Agent 365 management tools.

From OpenClaw to Autopilot: Autopilot grew out of Microsoft’s experiments with OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent that went viral earlier this year. In March, Nadella described OpenClaw as a security risk akin to “a virus.”

By June, Microsoft had introduced Scout, an always-on personal agent for work that it called the first of its Autopilots. Nadella told investors in July that the agent was “powered by OpenClaw.” The new Copilot drops the Scout name, and people instead create and name their own Autopilots.

In his presentation this week, Andreou pitched Autopilot as the answer to the concerns that have kept agents like OpenClaw out of big companies.

“The hallmark of an amazing, long-running agent is autonomy and flexibility,” he said. “That is the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin.”

Each Autopilot runs in the cloud inside a company’s Microsoft 365 environment, with its own identity, memory and email address, and people can tag it in Teams or Outlook like a co-worker.

In a demo, a Microsoft employee playing the role of a regional manager at a retail chain gave his Autopilot, named Dot, one goal: make sure stores had inventory in time for Black Friday. It chose which Teams channels, email threads and inventory data to monitor, sent him a daily summary, and flagged a shipment problem that could affect 18 stores.

The adoption question: Microsoft reported more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats in July, up from 20 million in April. That’s still only about 7% of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats the company reported in January.

The new Copilot comes three weeks after Microsoft reorganized its financial reporting around a similar idea, creating a segment called Agents and Infra and moving GitHub’s cloud revenue into its Microsoft 365 business.

“It’s no longer about building or selling one app or service, but about connecting the entire trajectory of a ‘job to be done,'” Nadella wrote in a note to investors about the change at the time.

Microsoft 365 cloud revenue, which covers business and consumer subscriptions including Copilot and now GitHub, reached $100.3 billion in fiscal 2026 under the new structure, up about 19%. Microsoft doesn’t disclose how much of that comes from Copilot.

“None of these things really matter unless they actually go to work inside of your companies and deliver real value,” Andreou said.

Microsoft plans to share more at its Ignite conference, Nov. 17-20 in San Francisco.

It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.

Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.

“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”

He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.

Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.

A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”

A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.

He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.

As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.

Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.

“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”

He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”

He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.

Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.

Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.

Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”

He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.

Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.

He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.

“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.

“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”