Microsoft seeks ‘to raise the bar on our operational excellence,’ CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella said in a statement.

Microsoft has a new chief operating officer and executive vice president tasked with helping the vendor “drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners.”

Carolina Dybeck Happe–who served as chief financial officer and senior vice president of General Electric through the 130-plus-year-old company’s breakup into three separate businesses–takes on the newly created role as a member of the senior leadership team (SLT) reporting to Satya Nadella, CEO and chairman of the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant.

“I’ve come to admire Carolina through her work as a global business leader, including most recently her role in leading GE’s historic turnaround,” Nadella said in a blog post Thursday. “She is recognized for her ability to drive transformational change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value.”

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Microsoft Hires New COO

CRN has reached out to GE and Microsoft for comment. The vendor has more than 400,000 partners worldwide and expects the number of channel partners it works with to increase within the next 12 months, according to CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.

Reporting to Happe will be “the Commerce + Ecosystems organization in Cloud + AI, the Microsoft Digital organization in Experiences + Devices, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in Finance,” according to Nadella’s post.

Microsoft’s last operating chief was Kevin Turner, who left in 2016, according to CNBC. The shuffling of organizations comes about six months after Microsoft moved leaders around upon hiring Mustafa Suleyman for the role of Microsoft AI CEO.

As part of the Suleyman moves, Pavan Davuluri was promoted to lead a combined Windows Experiences and Windows + Devices team and report to Rajesh Jha, EVP of the Experiences + Devices division now reporting to Happe.

“These teams are doing mission-critical work for us with high ambition plans on how to empower our partners, customers, and employees with world class technology and experiences,” he said.

He said the hiring of a COO comes as Microsoft seeks “to raise the bar on our operational excellence, continually improving security, quality, and delivery to our customers, as well as the rigor with which we operate the business.”

“Building this capability is essential, and I want each of us to take as much pride in exceeding customer expectations in our fundamentals as we do in our product innovation,” Nadella said. “After all, both are mission critical to our customers and our future.”

Happe said in a LinkedIn post Thursday that she took the job because she “immediately saw the incredible opportunity for AI to benefit every aspect of its business as a catalyst for innovation, growth, and value creation.”

“I could not be more thrilled to bring my lifelong passion for technology and my global experience in partnering to deliver transformation at scale to Microsoft,” she wrote.

Happe has started working with Microsoft this month, according to her account with Microsoft-owned social media network LinkedIn.

In the COO role, her work will include “leveraging expertise in global transformation at scale, digitization, and continuous improvement to accelerate AI-based transformation across the company,” accordingto her LinkedIn account.

Happe started with GE in 2020 and worked on the spin-off of GE HealthCare in 2023 and spin-off of GE’s energy businesses into GE Vernova, completed in April. GE itself became GE Aerospace.