Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is shaking up how the tech giant approaches artificial intelligence with an unconventional leadership strategy: keeping executives out of the room. The CEO has launched a weekly AI accelerator meeting that deliberately excludes senior managers from presenting, instead giving the floor to lower-level technical employees working directly on AI projects. This bottom-up approach marks a radical departure from Microsoft’s traditional corporate hierarchy, where executives typically control the narrative in leadership meetings. Nadella wants unfiltered insights from engineers who are actually building AI products, not polished presentations from those managing them.
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According to internal memos obtained by Business Insider, Nadella created the new meeting format along with a corresponding Teams channel to speed up AI development and gather unfiltered insights from across the company. The approach is intentionally “messy and chaotic,” designed to avoid top-down AI leadership and get real-time feedback from engineers in the trenches.
The move reflects Nadella’s view that AI represents both an existential threat and a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Microsoft. He’s pushing the company to operate with unprecedented “intensity and urgency,” according to Business Insider sources familiar with the matter.
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This grassroots meeting structure is part of broader organizational shifts at Microsoft. Nadella recently promoted sales chief Judson Althoff to CEO of commercial business, freeing up his own time to focus on technical AI work. In internal messages to corporate vice presidents, Nadella urged leaders to “work and act like ICs” (individual contributors) rather than traditional managers.“We all have to work and act like ICs in our own orgs, constantly learning and unlearning,” Nadella wrote in a Teams channel for executives, as seen by Business Insider.The CEO is also having direct conversations with executives about whether they’re willing to commit to the “mountain of work” required for Microsoft’s AI transformation—or leave. “You’ve gotta be asking yourself how much longer you want to do this,” one Microsoft executive told Business Insider.Nadella has shifted his language from saying Microsoft is in the “early innings” to the “middle innings” of AI, signaling his determination to see the transformation through to completion.
