Microsoft hires former GE CFO Carolina Dybeck Happe as COO

Microsoft told employees on Thursday that it has hired Carolina Dybeck Happe as its executive vice president and chief operating officer, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Dybeck Happe comes from GE, where she was senior vice president and chief financial officer from 2020 until September 2023.

The appointment reflects Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring it remains coordinated as so much of the company has become oriented around artificial intelligence.

She will join Microsoft’s senior leadership team alongside finance chief Amy Hood, cloud and AI engineering leader Scott Guthrie and other executives.

“Carolina will partner with the SLT to help us drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.

Nadella said Dybeck Happe will take over Guthrie’s commerce and ecosystems organization, the Microsoft Digital IT team under Office software leader Rajesh Jha and the Microsoft Business Operations unit in the finance department.

Dybeck Happe’s appointment comes months after GE’s aviation and energy businesses, known as GE Aerospace and GE Vernova respectively, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange. GE announced plans to split into three companies in 2021.

GE CEO Larry Culp called Dybeck Happe “a high-impact executive” when GE announced in 2019 that it had picked Dybeck Happe to replace Jamie Miller as chief financial officer.

She joined GE from Maersk, where she had been finance chief. Before that, she spent almost 17 years at Swedish lock company Assa Abloy, where she became chief financial officer and deputy CEO.

Microsoft has not had an operating chief since 2016, when former Walmart executive Kevin Turner left.

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