--- title: "Satya Nadella Bets on a 33-Year-Old Snap Veteran to Revive Microsoft's Copilot" description: "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has handed Jacob Andreou, a 33-year-old former Snap product executive, control of the company's Copilot division — more than 11,000 people and an AI assistant that, so far, only a small fraction of customers pay for." category: "Companies" category_url: https://boursel.com/category/companies author: "Marcus Feldman" published: 2026-06-27T09:43:00.000Z updated: 2026-06-27T09:43:00.000Z canonical: https://boursel.com/article/satya-nadella-bets-on-a-33-year-old-snap-veteran-to-revive-microsofts-copilot tags: ["microsoft", "copilot", "ai", "satya-nadella", "jacob-andreou", "openai"] --- # Satya Nadella Bets on a 33-Year-Old Snap Veteran to Revive Microsoft's Copilot Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has handed Jacob Andreou, a 33-year-old former Snap product executive, control of the company's Copilot division — more than 11,000 people and an AI assistant that, so far, only a small fraction of customers pay for. Microsoft has put one of its most important products in unexpectedly young hands. Jacob Andreou, a 33-year-old executive who built his career at Snap, was promoted in March to executive vice president of Copilot — Microsoft's artificial-intelligence assistant — after barely a year at the company, [Fortune reported](https://fortune.com/2026/06/27/microsoft-copilot-boss-jacob-andreou-tapped-by-satya-nadella-to-save-ai-strategy/). He now oversees more than 11,000 people. ## What Copilot is, and why it's struggling Copilot is the AI assistant Microsoft has woven through its products — Windows, Word, Excel, Teams — and offers as a standalone chat app that competes head-on with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Microsoft pushed it hard after investing $13 billion in OpenAI, pitching businesses an assistant wired into their own documents and emails for a monthly fee on top of a Microsoft 365 subscription. The take-up has underwhelmed. Only about 4.5% of Microsoft 365's 450 million customers pay for Copilot features, according to Fortune — a low conversion rate that has weighed on sentiment, with Microsoft's shares down by double digits over the past year. The problem is not reach but reputation: "the general perception of Copilot is that 'it stinks,'" Jefferies analyst Brent Thill told Fortune, even as he acknowledged Microsoft's unmatched distribution. ## The bet on Andreou Andreou is an unusual pick for enterprise software. Snap hired him as a design engineer in 2015 and promoted him to vice president of product in 2018, where he oversaw design, data science and strategy at the consumer social app. In 2023 he left for the venture-capital firm Greylock to back consumer-AI startups, before Microsoft recruited him. The logic of the appointment is that Copilot's problem is a consumer-product problem — making something people actually want to use — and that a Snap-trained product leader knows how to do that. Since taking over, Fortune reports, Andreou has been consolidating Microsoft's sprawl of overlapping Copilot versions, cutting redundant teams, and dialing back the intrusive Copilot prompts that had annoyed Windows users. On the roadmap is a more capable assistant that blends personal and work data with coding and "agentic" features — software that can carry out multi-step tasks on a user's behalf — and a shift toward charging customers for what they actually use rather than a flat fee. ## What's at stake The competitive backdrop is unforgiving. OpenAI, Microsoft's own partner, is also its rival in consumer AI; Google's Gemini is strong on mobile; and Anthropic's Claude has gained ground with businesses. "This is one of the most intensely competitive environments tech has seen in the last 20 years," Andreou told Fortune. For investors, the question is whether consumer-product instincts translate to Microsoft's enterprise scale. Andreou has not run an enterprise software operation this large before, and Fortune reported that some employees have described punishing hours and worry the breakneck pace risks shipping software that falls short on compliance. Nadella's wager is that speed and focus are exactly what Copilot has lacked. The measure of success is simple to state and hard to achieve: converting some meaningful share of the 95% of Microsoft 365 users who, so far, have taken a pass. ## Sources - [The 33-year-old executive Satya Nadella is trusting to fix Microsoft's Copilot](https://fortune.com/2026/06/27/microsoft-copilot-boss-jacob-andreou-tapped-by-satya-nadella-to-save-ai-strategy/)