Microsoft reorg gives Ryan Roslansky additional Office role

Microsoft is giving LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky a bigger job, expanding his role to include oversight of Office productivity software, CNBC has learned.

Roslansky, who took over LinkedIn five years ago, is becoming executive vice president of Office, reporting to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s executive vice president for experiences and devices, according to a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella informed employees about the change in an email on Wednesday, said the person, who asked not to be named because the email was internal.

In his role as LinkedIn CEO, Roslansky will continue to report to Nadella, the person said.

LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016 for $27 billion, will keep operating as a subsidiary, after generating more than $17 billion in revenue over the past year. Roslansky joined LinkedIn in 2009 and previously worked at Yahoo.

In 2022, Microsoft rebranded its Office 365 productivity software bundle, which includes applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, to Microsoft 365. In addition to overseeing those products, Roslansky’s portfolio will also include the M365 Copilot app, which lets users edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Jha’s group released the app in 2020.

As part of the organizational change, Microsoft said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for business and industry Copilot products, and his team will move to Jha’s unit. They were previously part of Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie’s cloud and artificial intelligence group.

Lamanna supervises Dynamics 365 sales and customer service products that compete with Salesforce, as well as the Copilot Studio tool for easily building artificial intelligence agents.

In December, Nadella said that AI agents might become the way that people eventually interact with software systems that were designed for use inside large organizations.

“When was the last time any of us really went to a business application?” he told investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on their podcast. He said the company pays for a bunch of cloud software applications, but “we hardly use them and somebody in the org is sort of inputting data into it.”

“In the AI age, the intensity goes up because all that data now is easy, right?” Nadella said.

The company’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, anchored by Microsoft 365 subscriptions and LinkedIn, has turned more profitable in the past decade. The unit’s operating margin in the fiscal third quarter exceeded 58%, compared with 33% in 2017. Revenue was up 10% from a year earlier.