Microsoft is undergoing a regime change that could have a direct impact on its core business.
Rajesh Jha, EVP for experiences and devices, which covers Microsoft 365 and Windows, has announced his retirement, and a succession plan.
Jha will “transition out” on July 1 but remain in an advisory capacity. Interestingly, the company is appointing four EVPs to take over his duties: Longtime Microsoft alums Perry Clarke, Charles Lamanna, and Pavan Davuluri, and LinkedIn head Ryan Roslansky. They will all report directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
The move comes as Redmond has been actively repositioning itself as AI-first, and pushing hard into AI assistants, notably Microsoft Copilot. Recognizing the fervor around Claude Cowork, which stoked fears of a ‘SaaSpocalypse’ after it was rolled out in January, Microsoft recently intorduced an optional Copilot Cowork AI, based on Anthropic’s wildly-popular AI agent.
Coalescing around AI
“Rajesh Jha retiring gives Microsoft the chance to reshape and refocus its leadership over internal products while fulfilling an established roadmap,” said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group.
Jha has been a mainstay at the company for more than 35 years, during which time it has rolled out Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Copilot, all of which are now cornerstones of the tech giant’s portfolio.
In a blog post about his retirement, Jha emphasized Microsoft’s “great momentum,” and said that over the next few months, his team will work together to “finalize the full cascade of details” required with this kind of transition. “This includes aligning operating rhythms, decision ownership, and details on the future org structure, all so we’ll be fully aligned and ready to run at the start of FY27,” he said.
The new guard
Jha’s four replacements have significant experience within Microsoft, and with its expanding suite of AI-powered products. Here’s a quick breakdown.
Pavan Davuluri
Davuluri has been with Microsoft for 25 years, working across PC hardware, Surface, Windows, and silicon. Most recently, he served as president of Windows + Devices, where he led teams responsible for the strategy, design, and delivery of Windows commercial and consumer products, including cloud, platform, OS, apps, silicon, devices, and security. The division also oversees the supply chain and manufacturing of Microsoft hardware.
On his LinkedIn profile, Davuluri outlines some takeaways from his decades as a “product maker,” notably the value of end-to-end thinking and product differentiation.
“Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere,” he wrote in a recent X post. He later responded to subsequent criticism from developers on the company’s “weird direction” and their calls for reliability, performance, and ease of use.
“We care deeply about developers,” he insisted, adding that his team takes in “a ton of feedback.” However, he acknowledged, “we know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences.”
Charles Lamanna
Lamanna has spent 13 years at Microsoft, joining when the tech giant acquired his cloud monitoring startup, MetricsHub, in 2013. Prior to being promoted to EVP, he served as president of the business and industry Copilot division.
Lamanna has been behind Microsoft’s agentic AI push from the beginning, helping evolve Microsoft Copilot and development tool Copilot Studio, with which users can create custom AI agents. He has overseen the design, development, and engineering of AI-powered apps, autonomous agents, and low-code platforms, including Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
According to Microsoft, under Lamanna’s leadership, Power Apps has become a “market leader” used by 25 million monthly users. Dynamics 365 is also “one of the largest public cloud-hosted SaaS solutions globally,” used by more than 400,000 organizations worldwide.
He also helped develop Microsoft Azure.
Ryan Roslansky
Roslansky has been with LinkedIn for nearly 17 years, roughly six of those as CEO. In June 2025, he was tapped by Microsoft for a dual role leading Microsoft Office and M365 Copilot. He also still serves as head of LinkedIn, which Microsoft bought for $27 billion in 2016.
Roslansky has been reporting to Jha and Nadella, and is responsible for Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and M365 Copilot apps. Under his leadership at LinkedIn, he more than doubled the company’s annual revenue and its membership (which is now around 1.2 billion). Under his leadership, M365 Copilot continues to “scale rapidly,” now with more than 100 million active monthly users, according to Microsoft.
“Roslansky‘s success in building LinkedIn as a platform demonstrates the potential to have similar success with M365,” Hyuon Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights, commented when his Microsoft appointment was announced last year.
Perry Clarke
Clarke has spent more than two decades at Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn profile, most recently serving as president of M365 Core. He has worked on M365 for nearly 10 years, and previously helped run Exchange Mailbox Server.
Unlike his colleagues, Clarke doesn’t have much of an online or social presence.
Four heads to replace one?
It’s unclear what responsibilities will be doled out to each of Jha’s four successors. Having so many cooks in the proverbial tech kitchen could cause some directional confusion, but some industry watchers say it may be a necessary move.
The ecosystem surrounding Copilot, Windows, Office, and Microsoft 365 has expanded so much in terms of size and complexity that it’s “debatable” whether one person can run all of them successfully, noted Info-Tech’s Bickley. “Distributing leadership among multiple experienced leaders should help Microsoft move faster to execute and keep focus on those primary platforms,” he said.
And for enterprise IT buyers, the change will probably be seen more as a change in internal operational leadership rather than an “overall change in Microsoft’s product strategy,” Bickley noted.