Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly using a new 'cricket term' for the company; tells all his top managers: We are now in ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s love for cricket has reportedly made its way inside the company. According to a report by Business Insider, the tech CEO is now using a‘cricket term’ for the software giant’s progress in artificial intelligence (AI). Nadella, the report says, has shifted to telling the company’s top manager that it is in the “middle innings” rather than “early innings” of AI. “He wants to see the game through”, said one of the sources quoted by the publication.


Born and raised in Hyderabad, Satya Nadella has often said that cricket shaped his thinking from a young age. He has credited the sport for teaching him teamwork, strategy, resilience and the importance of playing for the collective rather than individual glory – lessons he says he often applies in Microsoft.

Microsoft’s AI strategy

Microsoft recently promoted its longtime sales chief Judson Althoff to an expanded CEO role of the tech giant’s commercial business. The move is aimed to give Satya Nadella and its engineering leaders to focus on AI.


In an internal memo, seen by BI, Nadella told employees that “This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work — across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation — to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift”.


According to the report, Satya Nadella has also started a weekly AI accelerator meeting to speed up the pace of AI work at the company. Interestingly, these meetings are not attended by Microsoft’s top executives and managers. Instead, lower-level technical engineers are invited to these AI weekly meetings where they are asked to “share what they're seeing from the AI trenches.” The company has intentionally kept these meetings ‘messy and chaotic’ to avoid top-down AI approach in leadership.