Microsoft has named Mustafa Suleyman head of its consumer artificial intelligence business, hiring most of the staff from his Inflection AI startup as the software giant seeks to fend off Alphabet’s Google in the fiercely contested market for AI products.
Suleyman, who co-founded Google’s DeepMind, will report to CEO Satya Nadella and oversee a range of projects, such as integrating an AI Copilot into Windows and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine. His hiring will put Microsoft’s consumer AI work under one leader for the first time.
Inflection has been a rival of Microsoft’s key AI partner OpenAI. The company is shifting to selling AI software to businesses but will continue operating its Pi consumer chatbot business for now. Karen Simonyan, Inflection’s co-founder, will join Microsoft as chief scientist for the new consumer AI group.