Kevin Scott

CTO & EVP of AI — Microsoft

Profile

Kevin Scott is the person who turned Microsoft into an AI company. As CTO and Executive VP of AI, he’s the technical counterpart to Satya Nadella — and the one who actually architected the partnership with OpenAI that reset the industry in 2019. Nadella signed the checks, but Scott did the due diligence, saw the shape of the scaling curves, and convinced Microsoft leadership that a research lab burning through Azure credits was worth a $1B bet. Everything that came after — GPT-4 on Azure, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, the $13B+ total commitment — flows from that call.

Scott’s backstory is unusual for a big-tech CTO. He grew up in rural Gladys, Virginia, son of a construction worker who was often out of work, and was the first in his family to go to college. He did a PhD stint (didn’t finish), spent time at Google on mobile ads, then went to LinkedIn as SVP of Engineering, where he rebuilt the platform and stayed through the Microsoft acquisition. Nadella tapped him as CTO in 2017. If you read his book Reprogramming the American Dream, the small-town origin story isn’t window dressing — it shapes his actual thesis that AI’s biggest upside is lifting people and places that the last tech wave left behind.

What makes Scott matter to developers is that he’s not just a dealmaker. He runs Microsoft’s AI infrastructure strategy — the Maia custom silicon program, the multi-gigawatt datacenter buildouts, the model and tooling stack that GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI ride on. He’s a public bull on scaling laws when that’s become a contrarian position: his line is “we’re not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up” and he keeps putting Microsoft’s capex behind it. At Microsoft Build 2025 he laid out the “agentic web” — open standards like MCP as the HTTP of an internet where agents, not humans, do most of the clicking. He’s also predicted that 95% of new code will be AI-generated within five years, which is either the most useful forecast or the most annoying one, depending on whether you’re shipping or fearing.

He also hosts Behind the Tech, a long-running podcast where he interviews people like Bill Gates, Andrej Karpathy, and Reid Hoffman. It’s worth listening to because Scott is an engineer first — the conversations dig into craft and systems, not hype. If you want to understand how AI is actually being rolled out to hundreds of millions of enterprise seats, Scott is closer to the mechanics than almost anyone else speaking publicly.