Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Satya Nadella relinquishes his role as Microsoft’s communicator-in-chief—right when he’s needed most

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on Satya Nadella’s smaller public role.
The big story: S&P 500 decline looks set to continue.
The markets: In the red, with sharp drops in Asia.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Microsoft Ignite, the tech giant’s annual developer and IT conference, will kick off this morning in San Francisco. For the first time since he brought together Microsoft’s disparate tech events under one banner as a rookie CEO a decade ago, Satya Nadella will not deliver the opening keynote. Instead, that role will go to Judson Althoff, who leads Microsoft’s commercial business. That’s a shame as we need to be hearing more from CEOs like Nadella right now, especially given his stature in a time of mounting public mistrust of both tech leaders and AI.

Nadella announced last month that he’s taking a more internal focus, handing off some of his responsibilities to Althoff to focus on the company’s “highest-ambition technical work.” I bet a lot of his peers would love to do that: With the exceptions like Marc Benioff and John Chambers, many tech leaders I’ve met don’t relish the public-facing part of their jobs. Nadella did recently post a short essay on LinkedIn, laying out his vision for AI platforms to create a “positive-sum” future in which companies can “build their own AI native capabilities and enterprise value” versus what he calls “zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype.”

That’s an important message from the leader of a company that has a complicated history when it comes to creating tech ecosystems that sometimes lock in users and lock out competition. It’s a message that would get a lot more attention if he said it on stage this morning when the spotlight will be on Microsoft.

Every CEO has three basic roles: to create the vision and strategy of their company, to build the leadership team to execute on that vision and strategy, and to create the conditions to successfully replace themselves. Transcending all that is a CEO’s responsibility to be communicator-in-chief, the face of the company, the one who breaks big news and answers questions from investors, customers, regulators and journalists, among others.

With all the talk of AI bubbles, mass layoffs, business transformation and more, it’s even more important to hear from CEOs. It matters when Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar talks about hiring liberal arts graduates or when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes about developing superintelligence. That doesn’t mean we have to believe everything they say: my colleague Shawn Tully has a piece out today about the potential disconnect between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s rhetoric and reality.

Althoff will no doubt do a credible job at the keynote and I look forward to hearing what he has to say. But in a company that’s shaping the AI revolution, we should also be hearing from the person at the top.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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