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Redmond, Washington
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft has been chosen as the CNN Business’ CEO of the Year. According to CNN Business, under his leadership, the company is re-emerging as a tech innovator after years of riding the success of Windows. Wall Street has noticed, too: Microsoft’s stock is up 55% this year.
Nadella was chosen as the CEO of the Year, beating out other contenders including Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“There’s no question 2023 was the year of AI,” Nadella told CNN in an emailed response. “We’re no longer just talking about innovation in the abstract; we’re seeing real product-making, deployment and productivity gains. At the end of the day, though, this innovation will only be useful if it’s empowering all of us in our careers, in our communities, in our countries.”
Born in India, Nadella came to the US in the late 1980s to pursue a master’s in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He later did an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He joined the company in 1992 as an engineer. Nadella was promoted to CEO nearly 10 years ago.
In Nadella’s 2017 book, “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone,” he wrote about his experience reworking everything internally, team by team and product by product, so Microsoft would be better set up for employees to collaborate with others.
In 2016, under the leadership of Nadella, the company partnered with OpenAI — a then-emerging company with new AI tools — and allowed them to operate the technology on its Azure cloud servers in exchange for access to those tools.
