The third coming of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman

Microsoft employees stream down a hallway by the dozen, smartphones and paper coffee cups in hand, many clad in heavy coats on this frigid February morning. The setting is idyllic—Lake Washington is in full view through floor-to-ceiling windows—but they stride purposefully. As they do, they pass a digital sign with a tersely worded call to action:

All squads ship

Competing/differentiating

Growing work every sprint to double Successful Sessions

ABS
(Always Be Shipping)

Despite the profusion of Microsofties on the premises, this isn’t Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus. Instead, these staffers have taken over a Hyatt hotel in Renton, another Seattle suburb. They work for a division known as Microsoft AI—MAI for short—and have traveled from corporate outposts as distant as the U.K., Switzerland, China, and India to attend a team off site.

Mustafa Suleyman, MAI’s CEO, instituted these conclaves upon arriving at Microsoft just under a year ago—part of an unorthodox mass hiring in which the software behemoth absorbed most of the staff from Inflection AI, the startup Suleyman cofounded in 2022. The gatherings take place roughly once every seven weeks, and part of their purpose is unblinking self-assessment. Ahead of the meeting, around 80 squads of 6 to 15 people apiece have rated themselves on their success in hitting recent deadlines on a scale of red, amber, or green. The results aren’t great—but Suleyman sees that as progress in itself.

“It’s taken a few cycles to get people to be basically honest in terms of their scoring,” he tells me shortly after presiding over the event’s keynote presentation. “And this time, there was lots of red—like almost 45% red. I think that was a really, really good moment; and we sort of stood up and owned it. I was very proud of the team.”

Though being CEO of something called “Microsoft AI” sounds like a job of nearly unlimited purview, Suleyman does have a more specific remit. He’s charged with using AI to transform the company’s consumer properties, including the free Copilot chatbot app available on the web and in versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. The progress MAI measures in squad-size chunks all levels up to a much higher goal: building an AI companion that not only answers questions accurately but performs tasks based on a deep understanding of your needs. And not just an anodyne chatbot, but a warm and relatable persona you’ll enjoy spending time with.

In its present form, Copilot has barely begun to hint at this wildly ambitious vision. But as Microsoft pushes forward, “You’ll start to see Copilot become a platform that enables a personalized AI companion for you,” promises Suleyman. “It’ll have its own name, have its own visual representation, have its own personality, and really be your sidekick. What we are building is your second brain, your aide, your consigliere, your reliable chief of staff in your pocket.”

It’s lofty talk, but Suleyman—whose round, wire-frame glasses help give him the presence of a particularly glib owl—has a knack for explaining AI in a compelling fashion. His cautionary 2023 book on the subject, The Coming Wave, was a New York Times Best Seller; his 2024 TED talk, “What is an AI Anyway?” has been viewed 2.7 million times. More importantly, his bona fides include cofounding not just Inflection, but before that DeepMind in 2010. The London-based company made computing history when it created software that taught itself to play the famously complex Chinese board game, Go, better than any human. Then it developed an algorithm for predicting how proteins fold themselves, a transformative tool for drug discovery.

Both of those landmark feats reached fruition after Google acquired DeepMind in 2014; Suleyman left DeepMind in 2019 and exited Google altogether in 2022, shortly before founding Inflecton. In 2023, Google merged the company with another AI arm, Google Brain, to form Google DeepMind, with Suleyman’s fellow cofounder Demis Hassabis as CEO. The combined operation is responsible for the Gemini large language model now used in many Google products, putting Suleyman in direct competition with his former colleagues. (Suleyman says he remains friendly with Hassabis, but argues that competition fuels creativity, noting that in February, he recruited the engineers responsible for one of Google’s best-received uses of AI: its uncanny “Audio Overview” synthetic podcasts.)

In terms of raw users, Copilot has some catching up to do. According to data from intelligence company Similarweb, the consumer version—which is distinct from the one that’s part of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite—had a desktop and mobile web audience of just 15.6 million in January. That was far behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT (246 million), Chinese upstart DeepSeek (79.97 million), and Gemini (47.3 million), though ahead of Perplexity (10.6 million) and Anthropic’s Claude (8.2 million). This data doesn’t include people who use Microsoft’s free Copilot app, but market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says that ChatGPT currently has 30 times the monthly active users of consumer Copilot.

Microsoft is not wholly dependent on Copilot to reach consumers. Bing, another part of Suleyman’s portfolio, may only have 4% of the search market to Google’s 90%, according to StatCounter, but with an audience of 174 million people in January, it’s larger than any AI bot except ChatGPT, per Similarweb. His group also oversees Microsoft’s Edge web browser, which comes bundled with Windows and could become a potent AI delivery system of its own. And over time, Suleyman’s AI companion vision might give Copilot more market traction by clearly differentiating it from ChatGPT. (The two products share many technical underpinnings thanks to the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership.) Still, the relative tininess of Copilot’s current user base shows that the vision of Microsoft’s signature consumer-AI effort has yet to transform into the kind of mass attention the company cares about.

Then again, it’s not like anyone else has truly figured out consumer AI. The industry’s often-clumsy stabs at it—such as Google’s gaffe-ridden AI Overviews and short-lived Meta bots personified by the likes of Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton—can feel like answers to questions nobody asked. “Every single company is trying to understand what the market wants at this point,” says Divya Kumar, Microsoft‘s general manager of search and AI marketing. “We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

But Suleyman can’t depend on Microsoft’s rivals flailing forever; if MAI doesn’t create the first true AI consigliere, somebody else surely will. Hence, the intensity he brings to managing and motivating his team, a job he describes as “building the cultural flywheel that then builds the product.” That goal was apparent in a February email to his staff—written shortly after DeepSeek’s stunningly efficient LLM shocked the AI industry—in which Suleyman predicted more surprises ahead and called for a great hunkering down.

“What MAI needs from everyone this year is extreme focus,” he wrote. “The competition will be unlike anything we’ve seen. This is for real. This is the time to do the best work of your lives.”

The son of an English nurse mother and Syrian cab-driver father, Suleyman landed on AI as his life’s work not because he was in love with the technology for its own sake, but because he saw its potential to make the world a better place. At 19, he dropped out of the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy and theology, to help start a telephone counseling service for Muslim youth. He then served as a human rights policy officer for London Mayor Ken Livingston and cofounded a consultancy dedicated to driving societal change on a global scale.

Suleyman was only 25 when he and two friends, who had the training in computer science he lacked (Hassabis and Shane Legg), started DeepMind in 2010. The company was a bet on their conviction that evermore-powerful supercomputers would lead to an epoch-shifting moment when AI would surpass human cognitive ability across an array of disciplines. Legg called that phenomenon Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.

Early on, their faith that AI‘s future would be extraordinary was so contrarian, Suleyman says, that “we never really talked openly about our ambition to build AGI—that was always something that we whispered in hushed tones to each other and among a very small group.” Eventually, though, the entire field adopted AGI as a concept—and a goal.

DeepMind indeed made historic progress, putting Suleyman at the heart of the AI revolution just as it was taking off. But in a major career setback, he left DeepMind in 2019—reportedly not by choice but precipitated by complaints from employees that he had a bullying management style. In a 2022 podcast, he accepted the criticism—”I really screwed up”—and said that he’d since worked with an executive coach to become a better boss.

By the end of his DeepMind tenure, Suleyman says, he was itching to get AI out of the lab and into the real world. Rather than leave Google altogether, he spent another two years at the company as VP of AI product management and AI policy. Among his responsibilities was working with the Google Brain team, which had developed an LLM called LaMDA. At the time, ChatGPT didn’t exist; even OpenAI‘s GPT LLM hadn’t proven itself capable of powering radically new AI experiences.

LaMDA “was at GPT-3 level performance, at least a year earlier than GPT-3,” Suleyman remembers. Leveraging it into new Google features would have been a bold, attention-grabbing move. But it also would have been risky and required sign-off from many internal stakeholders. Suleyman struggled to rally support.

“That was really on me,” he says. “I was the one trying to get this out the door—persuade the lawyers, persuade the policy people, persuade Google Search. And for some reason, there was just a series of mental blockers in the company.”

Concluding that this effort had reached a standstill, Suleyman departed Google in January 2022. Officially, he was joining venture capital firm Greylock as a partner. Barely more than a month later, however, he returned to AI with the launch of Inflection. Suleyman and his cofounders, DeepMind principal research scientist Karén Simonyan—now MAI’s chief scientist—and LinkedIn cofounder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman quickly lined up $225 million in funding. Suleyman didn’t spell out the startup’s exact plans beyond acknowledging they involved making it easier for humans to communicate with computers: “It feels like we’re on the cusp of being able to generate language to pretty much human-level performance,” he told CNBC.

What that meant became clearer in May 2023, when Inflection introduced Pi, its chatbot. Short for “personal intelligence” and available on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as the web and as an iPhone app, Pi was a rough draft of Suleyman’s notion of an AI companion—optimized for engaging conversation rather than purely informational utility. “I chatted about philosophy with it for what turned out to be 2 hours,” wrote an impressed Reddit user. “I kept waiting for it to ‘break’ and say stupid random stuff like [ChatGPT does] but it kept going coherently.”

As Pi was establishing itself, Suleyman found himself in an ongoing dialog with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about their companies’ respective futures. Microsoft had invested in Inflection and was providing the startup with cloud services, so it was only natural they’d talk. But by the winter of 2023—a period when Sam Altman’s brief ouster at OpenAI highlighted how vulnerable Microsoft had left itself by tethering its AI vision to an outside partner—Nadella was proposing scenarios involving Suleyman joining Microsoft in some capacity. 

Suleyman was willing to listen. Microsoft already had a deep technological platform, a large consumer footprint it knew how to monetize through advertising, and the ability to shovel its formidable resources to high-priority initiatives—assets Inflection couldn’t match on its own. Furthermore, Suleyman’s confidence in Inflection’s initial business plan, which involved building high-cost computing clusters to train its own in-house LLM, Inflection-1, had been shaken by new developments such as Meta’s open-sourcing of its Llama AI model, which made a world-class LLM available to any company that wanted to use it. “I just did not predict that a public company would make the crown jewels available to everybody,” he says, calling the realization of how that might impact the competitive landscape “painful.”

Nadella, too, had reason to reassess Microsoft’s AI strategy, particularly on the consumer front. For all the benefits the company had reaped from its investment in OpenAI, the tantalizing sense that it might help Bing bite into Google’s dominance in sudden and dramatic fashion hadn’t panned out. Nor had Copilot become ChatGPT’s peer in traffic and name recognition, despite being based on some of the same underlying GPT technology. “As of right now, it feels to me as an outside observer that they haven’t gotten nearly the leverage that they would’ve wanted on the consumer side,” says tech investor and writer M.G. Siegler.

Suleyman is quick to underline that he could have continued pursu