The Architect of Microsoft’s Vaunted Cloud Bundle Turns His Gaze to AI

When Microsoft announced the retirement of its longtime chief marketing officer, Chris Capossela, last October, its choice of his successor may have seemed counterintuitive to outsiders. Unlike Capossela, who had a flair for the spotlight, Takeshi Numoto has kept a low profile inside the software giant as a marketing executive over the past two decades. Numoto rarely spoke publicly at Microsoft conferences or product rollouts, and his face is unfamiliar to some of the company’s largest customers.

But behind the scenes, Numoto has been one of Microsoft’s most influential leaders. Even before his promotion, his ambit has been far wider than that of a typical CMO. One of CEO Satya Nadella’s closest advisers, Numoto is revered within the company for his knack for growing revenue. He is credited with having figured out how to raise prices for Microsoft’s packages of software without alienating customers. His strategy turned Microsoft’s cloud business into an unqualified success, lifting cloud revenue to $140 billion in the year to June 2023 from $8 billion in 2015.

In doing so, Microsoft escaped the fate of other aging enterprise tech pioneers like IBM or Cisco by convincing millions of businesses to keep spending more money on its products and services, from videoconferencing apps to cybersecurity software, and it also avoided losing customers to younger enterprise software firms. Numoto’s next challenge may be just as pivotal: He has to persuade customers to spend even more money as they start using Microsoft’s artificial intelligence–powered versions of Office and other services.