Microsoft increases its focus on artificial intelligence by creating a new CoreAI team
Microsoft continues to bet big on AI and the company has created a new artificial intelligence engineering division called CoreAI. The new development-focused unit is headed by Jay Parikh -- once Meta's VP and global head of engineering -- and the intention is to speed up AI infrastructure and software development at Microsoft.
CEO Satya Nadella describes 2025 as being "about model-forward applications that reshape all application categories". Nadella clearly wants to power forward in what he says is the "next innings of this AI platform shift".
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In an email to employees about CoreAI, Nadella said: "As we begin the new year, it’s clear that we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift. Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!"
More than just bringing every AI-related under one umbrella -- such as Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive) -- the creation of CoreAI marks something of a shift in Microsoft's approach:
We will build agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Further, how we build, deploy, and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic.
This is leading to a new AI-first app stack -- one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a reimagined management and observability layer. In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools -- spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code -- on top of it. In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software (i.e. "service as software").
The aim is to help with the creation of the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for Microsoft first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents. The company says it need to have "the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure" to succeed, and this latest announcement is very much part of this vision.
Satya Nadella's email is available to read in its entirety over on the Microsoft blog.
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