LinkedIn CEO takes a second role under a new Microsoft organizational structure

Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, is taking a second role under a new Microsoft organizational structure. He will oversee the company’s office suite—including Word, Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Copilot—while retaining his role on LinkedIn.

According to someone familiar with the development, Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices.

The tech firm assigned Roslansky, who has run LinkedIn for the last five years, more responsibility, adding the productivity software company’s oversight to his duties.

The shift was reportedly announced to employees in an email from Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, on Wednesday, June 4, who requested anonymity because the email was confidential.

As the CEO of LinkedIn, Roslansky will continue reporting to Nadella, according to the individuals. Roslansky, who became an employee of LinkedIn in 2009, used to work at Yahoo.

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn, marking a significant milestone in its ecosystem 

Earlier, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn in a cash deal worth $26.2 billion, paying $196 for each share. They announced the agreement in June 2016 and finished it in December. According to the tech firm, the purchase was to grow the business and email software market, so they viewed LinkedIn’s large network as an important resource to combine with their current products.

They also aimed to incorporate LinkedIn into their larger system, including Office 365. The acquisition wrapped up in December 2016, and since then, LinkedIn has worked as a fully owned part of Microsoft while keeping its unique brand and culture. 

To their expectations, LinkedIn pulled in more than $17 billion in revenue over the past year. Additionally, the company’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, anchored by Microsoft 365 subscriptions and LinkedIn, has become more profitable in the past decade. The unit’s operating margin in the fiscal third quarter exceeded 58%, compared with 33% in 2017. Revenue was up 10% from a year earlier.

The tech firm renamed its Office 365 productivity software bundle – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams to Microsoft 365 in 2022. Along with running those products, Roslansky’s portfolio will include the M365 Copilot app, enabling users to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. The Copilot app was originally launched by Rajesh Jha’s team in 2020.

After his promotion, Roslansky highlighted Office’s worldwide reach and legacy, calling it one of the most influential productivity apps ever developed.

He noted the unique opportunity to lead through a time of transformation, where productivity, connectivity, and artificial intelligence come together.

Highlighting the daily use of both Office and LinkedIn by professionals worldwide, Roslansky expressed enthusiasm about helping redefine Microsoft’s role in this new environment.

Microsoft undergoes changes amid Roslansky’s added responsibility

As part of the organization reshuffling, Microsoft said Charles Lamanna, a corporate vice president for business and industry Copilot products, and his team would shift to Jha’s unit. They used to be part of the cloud and artificial intelligence team led by Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie. 

Lamanna oversees the Dynamics 365 sales and customer service products that compete with Salesforce and the Copilot Studio tool to make it easy for businesses to build artificial intelligence agents.

In December, Nadella suggested that AI agents could also be how people will eventually relate to software systems built for use inside big organizations.

During a podcast hosted by investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posed a pointed question: when was the last time they personally used a business application? He noted that while companies often pay for numerous cloud-based software tools, many go largely unused, with data simply being entered by someone else in the organization.

Nadella told the investors, “In the age of AI, it gets more intense because now all that data is easy to access, right?” 

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