It was the year of artificial intelligence, and no Big Tech company leaned into the trend like Microsoft.
In 2023, the company’s CEO Satya Nadella made a multi-billion dollar investment in AI, commercialized and added AI tools like ChatGPT into its suite of products before rivals, and stunned industry onlookers with his ability to handle a crisis quickly, calmly and thoughtfully.
Under his leadership, the company is re-emerging as a tech innovator after years of riding the success of Windows. Wall Street has noticed, too: Microsoft’s stock is up 55% this year.
That’s why CNN Business’ staff chose Nadella as the CEO of the Year, beating out other contenders including Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“There’s no question 2023 was the year of AI,” Nadella told CNN in an emailed response. “We’re no longer just talking about innovation in the abstract; we’re seeing real product-making, deployment and productivity gains. At the end of the day, though, this innovation will only be useful if it’s empowering all of us in our careers, in our communities, in our countries.”
Since 2018, the CNN Business’ team of writers and editors have met at the end of each year to select one person whose executive performance stood out. The process is admittedly subjective — we choose someone based on criteria that shifts year to year.
Maybe the company’s stock outperformed its rivals. Maybe the CEO righted the ship after a messy product launch or the company developed a lifesaving vaccine that altered the course of human history (tip of that hat to 2021’s CEO of the Year, Pfizer’s Albert Bourla).
This year’s CEO of the Year is once again a man, indicative of a larger representative problem in corporate America’s top positions. About 10% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are women, according to Fortune. But our aim has never been to endorse any one executive over another. Rather, we hold a mirror up to the business world and tell a story about what we see. (We also considered non-CEO leaders, and chose Taylor Swift as our business leader of the year.)
For 2023, Nadella’s decisions have heavily impacted and influenced the direction of AI, the most significant innovation to come from Silicon Valley in decades.
As Gil Luria, a senior research analyst at wealth management firm DA Davidson, puts it: “His ability to steer the aircraft carrier that is Microsoft into this new era has been nothing short of remarkable.”
