Microsoft has announced its current UK CEO Clare Barclay is stepping down to become Microsoft’s president, enterprise and industry, EMEA, with Darren Hardman taking the top role as new Microsoft UK CEO from November.
The company’s leadership change was said to reaffirm Microsoft’s commitment to “helping customers and partners make the most of the platform shift to AI in this new age of digital transformation”.
During her tenure as CEO of Microsoft UK, Clare Barclay has enabled the company to build notable industry AI partnerships including the London Stock Exchange Group, Vodafone and Sainsbury’s. In her new role as president, Barclay will use her experience to explore innovation and growth with customers, digital innovators, start-ups and partners across Microsoft’s 120 markets in EMEA.
Darren Hardman will take on the role of Microsoft UK CEO on 1 November, having joined the company back in May 2023 as corporate vice president, EMEA. Previously he worked as the AWS CEO for UK&I and as president of Avanade EMEA. Hardman’s tenure at Microsoft has been marked by an industry centric approach to AI, building upon partnerships across enterprise and start-up customers in EMEA.
Ralph Haupter, EMEA president, Microsoft, said: “Clare and Darren both bring unique strengths and insights to their new roles. With this strategic leadership transition, we will bring the best of our industry and AI execution to our UK and EMEA customers.”
This news follows from Microsoft’s recent AI tour event in London, where CEO Satya Nadella expanded upon Redmond’s post-ChatGPT Copilot era for enterprise tech as the company revealed a series of new AI agents for Dynamics 365. Nadella foresees an agent-driven future for AI, with vendors such as SAP, Salesforce, Boomi and ServiceNow sharing this vision as smart AI agents become the next step beyond 2023’s GenAI copilots.
