Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external and legal affairs organization led by Brad Smith, its vice chair and president, according to internal emails Thursday from Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Brent Colburn, Microsoft’s VP of global public affairs, was named interim communications leader, effective next week, reporting to Smith. Colburn announced this month that he was leaving the company in mid-October. He will now stay through December and is not a candidate for the permanent role.
Frank X. Shaw, the longtime Microsoft communications chief who announced earlier this month that he would leave the company at the end of the year, will step away from his current responsibilities and serve as an advisor to Smith and Colburn during the transition, according to the memos.
Building in public: Nadella’s memo described the change in the organizational structure as a response to a shifting media environment, and said the larger plan is to make employees a bigger part of Microsoft’s public voice.
He said Microsoft needs to “find new ways to connect directly with all of our constituencies” in a media environment he called “increasingly fragmented and noisier than ever.”
“In many ways, the people closest to the work have the best opportunity to shape how Microsoft is understood,” Nadella wrote. He said he wants to help engineers, sellers, partners and others “closest to our products and customers” become “an even bigger part of how we tell our story, all connected by a shared strategy and set of principles.”
The approach Nadella described is closer to how AI labs and startups operate. OpenAI and Anthropic tend to be more fluid with their blogs and livestreams, and AI researchers and leaders are more likely to post directly and informally in their own voices.
Microsoft has been working to make more of a mark of its own in AI, building in-house models under Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI group, while Copilot trails ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in consumer adoption. In recent weeks, Meta has made a splash with its Muse AI assistant and a new device called Muse Charm, a palm-sized gadget it previewed Wednesday.
Nadella and the company’s engineering leadership have been pushing to modernize Microsoft’s communications, moving toward a more direct approach and building in public, according to a person familiar with the situation.
“We will learn, we will experiment, and we will evolve,” Nadella wrote. “There is a fundamentally new way to think about communications, and this team will be central to building it.”
Smith echoed the point, writing that Microsoft will “likely have more employees and executives acting as part of Microsoft’s public voice, including on social media.”
The timing: Shaw’s shift to an advisory role surprised some inside the company. Announcing his exit two weeks ago, he said he would be at Microsoft “through the end of the calendar year.” Microsoft said at the time that it would take “the coming months” to determine its future communications leadership.
Contacted via phone, Shaw described this as the formalization of the plan that was announced. He will still be at Microsoft through the end of the year in an advisory role.
In a statement, Microsoft said Shaw “has been a trusted counselor and leader at Microsoft for more than two decades, and we’re grateful he will continue to act as an advisor during the transition.”
Nadella thanked Shaw in his memo, saying he has “made tremendous contributions to the company and to our communications function over the last 17+ years” and has been “a great source of counsel to our leadership team and to me personally, across the company’s biggest moments.”
In his memo, Smith wrote of Shaw that he has “worked as closely with him as almost anyone” over those years, and that Shaw’s “enduring impact on Microsoft and this team will be felt for years to come. I will miss him.”
Smith said Microsoft has launched a search for a new chief communications officer that includes internal and external candidates. He will work on the selection with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, and Amy Coleman, its chief people officer.
The next chief communications officer is also expected to report to Smith, which indicates the change is permanent and not just for the interim period.
The new structure: Nadella called Smith one of the few leaders who “embody Microsoft’s voice” authentically, citing his “rare ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity, conviction, and trust.”
Smith’s organization handles Microsoft’s legal, regulatory and public policy work, including antitrust matters, litigation and government relations. Communications will now sit alongside those functions rather than with marketing and product, although both memos emphasize continued coordination between the two.
The communications leadership team will expand to include Caitlin McCabe, Carol Ann Browne and Dave Imperiale, according to Smith’s memo, citing the communications roles they play for Nadella, Smith and Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business. Kate Frischmann will also join the team, reflecting her role on the public affairs side of Smith’s organization. In his interim role, Colburn will join Numoto’s leadership team in addition to Smith’s.
Nadella wrote that Microsoft’s upcoming fall events present “a real opportunity to bring together our product story, our marketing, and our communications in new ways.”
