According to a memo distributed to staff members on Thursday, Microsoft has appointed Carolina Dybeck Happe to the position of executive vice president and chief operations officer, which was created for the former GE chief financial officer.
Additionally, Dybeck Happe will report to CEO Satya Nadella and become a member of his senior leadership team. In his memo to staff members, Nadella underlined Microsoft’s ongoing efforts in artificial intelligence, noting that the company is taking advantage of “the opportunity to reinvent” itself with the hiring of Dybeck Happe.
“Carolina’s work as a global business leader has inspired me, especially her recent role leading GE’s historic turnaround,” Nadella wrote in the memo. She will support the leadership group in its efforts to “accelerate our company-wide AI transformation and drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations, increasing
As per her LinkedIn profile, Dybeck Happe held the position of chief financial officer at GE from March 2020 to September 2023. She was the chief financial officer of the multinational shipping company Maersk in Copenhagen, Denmark, prior to joining GE. She worked for Assa Abloy, a lock company located in Stockholm, Sweden, for 17 years prior to that.
She has a master’s degree in business and economics from Uppsala University in Sweden.
During her time at GE, the company announced plans to break up into three separate companies focused on health care, aviation and energy. The energy and aerospace companies launched in April and started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
With her hire, Microsoft will shuffle the organizations under its leadership. The commerce and ecosystems organization in cloud and AI, now under its executive vice president Scott Guthrie, will transition to Dybeck Happe. She’ll also take over Microsoft’s digital IT team and its business operations organization.
The appointment is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Microsoft this year. In March, Microsoft announced that it had hired two founders from AI startup Inflection to lead its AI organizations. One of the founders, Mustafa Suleyman, was named as Microsoft AI CEO.
Several of the company’s AI organizations consolidated under the new AI leadership.
Microsoft last had a chief operating officer about a decade ago, but has not filled a similar role since Kevin Turner left in 2016. Before his time at Microsoft, Turner was the CEO of Sam’s Club, a Walmart division.
