A company buying an AI assistant may already buy its office software, identity service and cloud capacity from Microsoft. Satya Nadella helped build the cloud business before he became chief executive. His position matters wherever a customer must decide how easily one part of that bundle can be replaced.
Microsoft · Nasdaq MSFT
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company in 1975 around a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. Microsoft floated in 1986. Nadella is chairman and CEO. Brad Smith serves as vice chair and president. Their titles identify different duties at the same company. Microsoft leadership
Capital and voting rights. Nadella holds Microsoft shares and reports transactions to the SEC. Its proxy discloses beneficial ownership and equity awards under different definitions. He runs a listed company founded by others. The disclosures cited here do not establish the original paid-in capital of the 1975 business. Microsoft proxy · Ownership filing
Building a model while hosting other people’s models
Azure sells computing capacity. Microsoft distributes assistants through its business software, invests in OpenAI and develops models of its own. MAI-Base-1 is an example of frontier pre-training research within Microsoft AI. Think of a hospital purchasing document software: its supplier can sell it a finished assistant, host a competing assistant or rent out the underlying computers. Each choice creates different costs if the hospital later changes its mind. Microsoft’s frontier research · FTC study of cloud partnerships
A precedent for separating products
In September 2025 the European Commission made Microsoft’s commitments concerning Teams legally binding. They addressed competition concerns involving the bundling of Teams with productivity software, including the conditions on which customers could buy suites without Teams. This was a corporate commitments decision. It provides a useful question for AI purchasers: what price, interoperability and access to their data will they retain if they choose a different provider? European Commission decision announcement
Information checked on 15 November 2026. Ownership figures and proposed transactions refer to the dates in the linked records.
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