The 33-year-old former Snap chief Nadella is hoping to fix Copilot now that he oversees 11,000 people.
The TL;DR
Nadella promoted Jacob Andreou to EVP of Copilot after one year. He directs 11,000 people and builds a great app while only 4.5% of 365 users pay.
Jacob Andreou, the 33-year-old executive Satya Nadella promoted to Copilot in March after one year at Microsoft, now oversees more than 11,000 people. He merged Copilot’s consumer and business teams, removed obsolete product versions, and built a great app that combines chat, coding, and a new workflow called Autopilot, according to a Fortune profile published Friday.
“This is one of the most competitive areas technology has seen in the last 20 years,” Andreou told Fortune.Because technology is moving so fast, the reality is that the six-to-twelve-month road isn’t quite what it used to be.“
The profile paints Andreou as a technically hands-on leader who writes code alongside developers. He built Copilot Tasks, an AI agent that can automate multi-step actions like ordering food, in about two months. That speed impressed Nadella, who dismantled Microsoft’s entire senior leadership structure this year in favor of startup-style engineering teams.
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Andreou’s appointment freed Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind’s founder, to focus on proprietary AI models rather than day-to-day product management. The two work together but run separate organizations. Suleyman told a group of about 80 developers in March that the future of software development means fewer people working hard using AI agents, according to Fortune.
The challenge is great. Only about 4.5% of Microsoft 365’s 450 million customers pay for Copilot, and its free consumer version trails behind ChatGPT. Microsoft stock is down by double digits in the past year as investors question the use of AI and the company’s reliance on OpenAI. Jefferies analyst Brent Thill said the general consensus on Copilot is that “it stinks.“
Prior to Microsoft, Andreou spent eight years at Snap scaling the platform from 80 million to 360 million daily active users. He then joined Greylock as a business partner supporting consumer AI initiatives. At Microsoft, he introduced usage-based pricing alongside seat licenses, scaled back the Copilot icons that annoyed Windows users, and launched Copilot Cowork to compete with Anthropic’s Claude.
Not everyone goes with the new culture. Current and former employees told Fortune that some teams now work 12-day shifts, feel nervous every day to keep up with Anthropic and other labs, and worry that the ship’s speed risks compliance issues. Critics say Andreou can be overconfident and has yet to prove himself in business software, where the burden is building long-term capital at scale.
The three priorities Andreou mentioned are delivering a superior AI conversational product, achieving the best model quality without delay to market, and providing a reliable way to integrate various models. The best app, expected by the end of summer, will allow users to switch between personal and business accounts in a single interface. Microsoft is also exploring hosting DeepSeek and other open source models within Copilot Cowork, while Nadella has warned against the industry’s reliance on a few AI providers.
