Microsoft’s new AI chief explains what’s at the top of his to-do list

• Microsoft's AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, has laid out his main goals for the company.
• The DeepMind cofounder is overseeing key teams, including Bing, Edge, and Copilot.
• In a podcast chat with Seth Rosenberg, Suleyman said he wanted to "uplevel" Copilot's quality.

Microsoft's newly installed AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, is keen to ensure that the Big Tech company is not underestimated.

On a recent podcast with Seth Rosenberg, Suleyman explained his new responsibilities at the company. He said he oversaw key teams, including Bing and Edge, and Copilot, Microsoft's flagship AI product.

Suleyman added that he'd been impressed with Microsoft's scale and reach since joining the company in March.

"The quality of products and their scale and reach is sort of much greater than you might think as a kind of default Silicon Valley person who had grown up in Google," he said.

He said the company's reputation in Silicon Valley needed a "rethink." Despite being one of the most valuable companies in the world, Microsoft has somewhat existed in the shadow of its old rival, Google, for the last decade.

Suleyman cofounded DeepMind before Google acquired it. After the acquisition, he spent two years at Google as a vice president of AI product management and AI policy.

After parting ways with the company in 2022, Suleyman cofounded Inflection AI, which Microsoft later acquired. He was then installed as CEO of Microsoft AI to lead the company's AI efforts.

Suleyman said his main goal at the company was to "uplevel the quality of Copilot."

"We're rapidly building some of the best models in the world, partnering very closely with OpenAI, building on top of all of OpenAI models and infrastructure, fine-tuning their models," he said, adding the next phase of AI assistants Microsft was eyeing focused on memory and personalization.

"Your AI should remember everything about you, all your context, all your personal data, everything that you've said and be there to support you and be your aid and your sidekick you know throughout your life. That's what we're going to be focused on," he said.

Microsoft's Copilot has proved relatively popular with users. The company benefited from being quick to market with the product, beating Google's rival effort by several months.

However, Business Insider previously reported that one of the top complaints from Microsoft's customers is that Copilot doesn't perform as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Microsoft has said customers aren't using the new tools properly and is paying a partner to produce videos to teach customers how to write better prompts.

Representatives for Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI made outside normal working hours.