Satya Nadella relinquishes his role as Microsoft's communicator-in-chief

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., departs following a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025

• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on Satya Nadella’s smaller public role.
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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.