The 33-year-old executive Satya Nadella is trusting to fix Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant

Jacob Andreou has had a rapid ascent at the 51-year-old tech giant. He is leading the charge to retool its pivotal AI product.

Early this year, Jacob Andreou had a crucial goal. The Microsoft executive set out to order a McDonald’s cheeseburger to his apartment across from the company’s Silicon Valley campus using a homegrown AI tool. Andreou and his team had worked nonstop to get the tool, named Copilot Tasks, up and running. If the AI agent inside Tasks could autonomously order the burger and get it to Andreou’s home, it would prove the tool worked as designed.

By the time Andreou reached his apartment, the burger had arrived.

What made the accomplishment so notable inside Microsoft is that Andreou, a polished 33-year-old executive with Hollywood ties and a knack for pitching and presentations, had been hands-on with software developers to release Tasks, employees said. It’s one reason the fast-rising executive has won respect from colleagues: He is technically savvy and immerses himself in projects.

The speed at which the tool was completed, which was about two months, also impressed Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, who has placed great trust in Andreou to guide Copilot, the company’s pivotal AI product, in a more competitive direction. Having fallen behind after leading early in the AI race, Microsoft is counting on Copilot, and Andreou, the product’s executive vice president, to pull it ahead. Andreou’s duty is to get the 51-year-old tech giant to move fast without breaking the trusted business relationships it has. The result is an organized chaos of employees driving hard every day to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top labs as Microsoft claws to get back to the top of the AI world.

Andreou, a talkative executive who relishes the intricate details of AI models and once led product at social media firm Snap, has had a rapid ascent. In March, after only a year at Microsoft, Andreou was promoted by Nadella to one of the company’s most important roles—an unusual move at the tech giant that signaled both Nadella’s urgency to improve Copilot and the leadership traits he believes are necessary to succeed in the new environment. 

“The moment we’re in is about focus and urgency,” Andreou told Fortune in an interview from Microsoft’s Mountain View, Calif. campus. “This is one of the most intensely competitive environments tech has seen in the last 20 years. Because the technology is moving so quickly, the reality is a six to twelve month roadmap doesn’t really exist in the way it used to.”

Andreou represents a changing of the guard. He is one of several young executives Nadella has promoted to major roles as the company competes with the nimbler AI startups. As traditional enterprise software executives depart Microsoft, they leave room for leaders like Andreou, or Xbox’s new chief, Asha Sharma, who is also in her 30s.

Copilot has struggled, and Microsoft’s shares are down double-digits in the past year as investors have fretted over AI’s impact on software, Microsoft’s reliance on OpenAI, and its heavy data center spending. Only about 4.5% of the 450 million Microsoft 365 customers pay for Copilot features, and its free consumer version trails far behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Microsoft has seen recent momentum. England’s National Health Service recently rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot to more than 500,000 staff, Nadella posted on X this month, proving that massive, regulated enterprise customers trust Microsoft to securely deliver AI.

Still, Copilot is going through a reset, with Andreou eliminating extraneous versions of the........

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