Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn leadership update
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, and Ryan Roslansky, Executive Vice President of LinkedIn and Microsoft 365, shared the below communications with Microsoft and LinkedIn employees this morning.
SATYA NADELLA MESSAGEAfter nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and Microsoft, Ryan Roslansky has decided to leave Microsoft and embark on his next chapter.
As Ryan and I have been discussing our roadmap and work ahead, we felt this was the right moment for this change. Ryan will stay through the end of the calendar year as an advisor to me and will support on the transition.
Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position. With Copilot, we are executing rapidly against our vision to build a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task, with Office fully embedded in Copilot and vice versa! Over the past year, Ryan’s team has done critical work bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that have made this next phase possible. Last week’s launch was an important milestone in that journey, and the strong response from customers, partners, and the broader ecosystem reinforced both how far we’ve come and how much opportunity remains ahead.
At LinkedIn, we remain focused on our core vision of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, helping our 1.3 billion members access the knowledge, insights, and opportunities they need to navigate rapidly changing professional and labor markets.
Effective today we will make the following changes:
- Sumit Chauhan and Lan Ye will report to Charles Lamanna.
- Jon Friedman will report to Jacob Andreou.
- Dan Shapero will continue as CEO of LinkedIn and Mohak Shroff will continue in his role, both reporting to me.
Over his nearly two decades at Microsoft, Ryan has helped shape how people around the world find opportunity, build their careers, and get their work done. I’ve always appreciated his clarity of thinking and I’m deeply grateful for everything Ryan has built, for the leaders and teams he has developed, and for his friendship and counsel.
Please join me in thanking Ryan for his extraordinary contributions to LinkedIn and Microsoft, and in wishing him the very best in what comes next.
Satya
RYAN ROSLANSKY MESSAGETeam,
In 1996, as a college freshman, I taught myself to code so a few friends and I could help other students find a place to live around campus. I didn’t know much. I did know the internet was about to change how people found things, and I wanted to be as close to that as possible.
In 2009, Jeff Weiner made me his first hire at LinkedIn. I’ve spent the nearly 18 years since working on a much bigger version of that same idea: helping people find opportunity, and then helping them do great work once they have it.
This has (obviously) been the best professional experience of my life.
As a product manager, I got to build dozens of features that are still around today (some good, some not so good!). When I became CEO in 2020, the world was months into a pandemic that changed what work even meant. Nobody hands you a playbook for that. This team wrote one anyway. Since then, LinkedIn has passed a billion members and nearly tripled its business, and every bit of that belongs to the people who built it.
Last year, Satya asked me to help build the future of M365. Once again, the old rules didn’t apply. AI was rapidly changing how professionals work, and the world’s largest productivity suite needed to lead the way. That meant figuring out what Copilot, and the future of work, should look like as one ecosystem.
We still have a ways to go, but the progress over the past year has been inspiring to watch. A lot of talented people set aside their own roadmaps to make that happen. Thank you. I know it wasn’t easy.
Satya, thank you. When LinkedIn joined Microsoft, you gave us room to build, and then trusted many of us with a lot more. I’ve learned more from you than I can fit in an email, and I’m grateful for the friendship that came with it.
All of which made this a hard decision. I know what it would take for me to lead the next phase of this work well: being in Redmond full time, every day. But my life and my family’s life are here in the Bay Area. My wife Leigh gives her time to more local organizations than I can keep track of. Our youngest daughter just started high school, and our dog Buddy remains deeply committed to the trails on the Peninsula!
I thought about this for a long time. It’s the right call. The work now goes to leaders who are set up to take it further. I can’t wait to see what they do with it.
Over the years, people have asked me what’s kept me so energized and motivated in this work. I think the answer is that I got to spend my career working where doing good and doing well are the same thing. In technology, that’s the best place to operate.
Most companies start by focusing on doing well, so doing good becomes a compromise. It’s the last slide of the PowerPoint, or a separate .org. But when doing good is built into the product itself, it becomes a real competitive advantage. When we build valuable products, people find jobs, they hire, they learn skills, they start companies, they run companies. That creates value for members, customers and the world. And for our business too.
Not many companies get to work this way, and not many people get the chance to build something like it. We do.
That matters more now than it ever has. Technology will continue to touch every job on the planet, and the people building it will decide what kind of world it helps create. I can’t think of a better group to figure that out than the people reading this note.
Thank you for the best 18 years I could have asked for.
RR
The post Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn leadership update appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
New Microsoft data innovations unlock what only your business knows
Every organization has knowledge that is uniquely its own: the way its business operates, the data it has built over time, the expertise of its people and the context behind thousands of everyday decisions.
As powerful AI models become more widely available, that unique business intelligence matters more than ever. The difference will come from how effectively organizations combine those models with the data, expertise and business context that make them unique.
Turning that intelligence into lasting advantage requires three elements to work together: human ambition to set the direction, intelligence grounded in the organization’s unique knowledge and trust to provide the foundation for operating at scale. Microsoft’s approach is designed to bring those elements together so organizations can build on what they know and create greater value over time.
That value can compound through a continuous learning loop, where AI draws on an organization’s data and expertise, improves the systems and experiences it creates and generates better outcomes over time without making the organization dependent on any single model provider.
Today at the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference in Barcelona, we are introducing advances across Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databases that help organizations put their data estate at the heart of a successful AI strategy.
Fabric IQ: Bring your unique business context into Microsoft CopilotAs Microsoft Copilot evolves across Home, Code and Autopilot, access to trusted business context becomes essential. Fabric IQ brings governed business context into Copilot, grounding experiences in the Power BI semantic models, metrics, relationships and business definitions organizations already trust.
With Fabric IQ in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Cowork now generally available, users can ask business questions and receive answers grounded in governed Power BI data, while Cowork can use those insights as part of broader multistep work. Integration with the new Code experience is coming through the Frontier program.
That means when someone asks Copilot for the latest sales forecast or another critical business metric, the answer can be grounded in the same semantic model that powers the organization’s reports, helping avoid confusion about which number is correct. For Power BI customers, this extends the semantic foundation they already have into Microsoft Copilot while preserving existing access controls and governance.
I experienced this myself recently as I was preparing for a sales review and asked Copilot, “What’s our latest sales forecast?” With Fabric IQ, that answer was grounded in the same governed Power BI semantic model that powers the team’s sales reporting, using the same business definitions and metrics my team already trusts. So, instead of spending the meeting uncovering and debating whose number was right, the team was able to get straight to what the numbers mean and focus on what we do next. That’s exactly the kind of experience we want to create.
For Fabric and Power BI customers, this capability is on by default in Copilot Chat and Cowork and extends the semantic foundation they already have into Microsoft Copilot while preserving existing access controls and governance.
IQ Sharing in Microsoft Fabric: Share unique business context without giving up controlBusiness knowledge does not stop at the boundary of a team or business unit. Organizations increasingly need to collaborate across customers, partners and broader ecosystems while maintaining control over the information they share.
IQ Sharing in Fabric, now in preview as part of Fabric IQ, breaks down company boundaries by enabling organizations to securely share data and the business context that gives it meaning, while maintaining governance over the underlying assets. Starting with key Fabric IQ artifacts and context, IQ Share is designed to evolve beyond preview to help customers discover, share and activate trusted context wherever it’s needed.
Together with OneLake mirroring and shortcuts, these investments create a more open foundation for sharing governed data and context across organizations, platforms and ecosystems.
Observability in Microsoft Fabric: Maintain visibility and control as AI scalesAs organizations put more workloads on their unified data platform, they need to understand system health and address issues before they affect business and AI outcomes.
Observability in Fabric helps teams move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive operations. Cross-workspace monitoring and an enhanced Monitor Hub provide a unified view across jobs, capacities, workspaces and workloads, while Operations Agents and Activator help teams investigate issues, identify root causes with AI and automate responses.
Together, these capabilities help organizations maintain oversight as they scale data and AI.
Fabric Apps: Build applications directly on governed business dataAI is transforming how applications are created, but enterprises still need a secure, governed path from idea to production. Fabric Apps brings application development directly to governed data in Microsoft Fabric, helping organizations build and scale AI-powered business applications faster.
With new capabilities for data connectivity, transactional workloads, backend logic, storage and policy-controlled access, developers can move from prototype to production on a unified data foundation. These experiences bring application creation closer to where enterprise data and insights already live, helping more people turn data into action.
Agentic data engineering: Automate the work, stay in controlA continuous learning loop is only as good as the data behind it, which must be prepared, refined and improved without pause. As those environments become more complex, organizations need automation that can take on more of that work without pushing people or controls out of the loop.
Earlier this year, we shared our vision for autonomous data engineering. Now, new agentic data engineering features in Fabric bring that vision to life, bringing autonomous execution to complex data engineering initiatives while keeping organizations in control. Engineers define the outcome and set the boundaries. Inside those limits, the agent plans and executes the work, validates the results and refines the approach.
SQL Server on Azure Local: Keep critical data and workloads where you need themMaintaining control over business knowledge also means having flexibility over where critical data and workloads run.
Now generally available, SQL Server on Azure Local brings SQL Server and Azure services into local environments, giving organizations more choice to run workloads closer to their applications and operations. SQL Server on Azure Local with disconnected operations, now in preview, extends that flexibility to environments where cloud connectivity is interrupted, restricted or unavailable.
These options give organizations operating across regulated, local, edge and disconnected environments greater choice over where their critical data and workloads reside and operate.
Database Hub in Fabric: Simplify database management with agentic assistanceIntelligent applications depend on operational data. Teams need a clear view of the databases that power those applications and practical tools to manage them.
Building on its introduction at FabCon Atlanta, Database Hub in Fabric is now in public preview. It provides a central control plane for managing SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and SQL databases in Fabric, helping administrators monitor and govern their database estate.
Complementing this management experience, specialist database agents for SQL and PostgreSQL in Database Hub in Fabric and Visual Studio Code, coming soon to public preview, help teams investigate issues, understand performance bottlenecks and identify optimization opportunities within their development environment.
Together, these capabilities help teams understand their database estate and make more informed operational decisions.
Build AI on the knowledge that makes your business differentOur goal is straightforward: help organizations use the best AI models and tools available while turning their proprietary data, expertise and workflows into an advantage that grows more valuable over time. That direction is reflected across today’s announcements as the data foundation comes into focus.
At Ignite, we’ll broaden this story across the full Microsoft Frontier ecosystem, connecting data, applications, agents, governance and infrastructure into one system that turns AI ambition into business outcomes.
Explore the complete set of announcements across Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databases in today’s blog from Arun Ulagaratchagan, Executive Vice President of Azure Data.
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