Executive Moves

Executive Moves You Should Know About This Week (January 21, 2025)

By Taylor-Dayne Davis

Last updated: Feb 6, 2025

Each week we explore some of the top executive moves across every industry and highlight them here. This week, we look at changes to the leadership team at Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, MSNBC and more.

Microsoft

Former Head of Engineering at Facebook (now Meta), Jay Parikh joined Microsoft in October and was dubbed Executive Vice President of the new AI engineering group, CoreAI—Platform and Tools. This internal division aims to advance AI capabilities and build agentic applications across key teams such as the Developer Division, AI Platform, and the Office of the CTO.

JPMorgan Chase

Following a 40-year legacy at the mega financial services corporation, JPMorgan Chase, Daniel Pinto sets his retirement date for the end of 2026. He will hand over his responsibilities as President and COO in June of 2025. Piepszak, a potential runner-up for CEO following Jamie Dimon’s exit plan for 2029, rejected consideration for the role and was announced as the new COO. Piepszak and Pinto were front-runners for the CEO spot, but both have strategically dodged the bullet.

MSNBC

Parent company, Comcast, spins off NBC Universal cable companies MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, and more as a separate publicly-traded company called SpinCo. MSNBC fights to keep its name and is successful, but the left-wing news network loses President Rashida Jones. Jones made history as the first black woman president of a major public cable news network in 2021 but will step down two days ahead of Trump’s inauguration day, a response to the turning of the tide. Rebecca Kutler, Senior Vice President of Content Strategy will serve as interim President.

Yum! Brands

The world’s largest restaurant company, Yum! Brands, appoints Scott Mezvinsky as the CEO of KFC. Current President of Taco Bell North America and International, Mezvinsky has a 20-year history with the parent company of brands KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and The Habit Burger Grill. Effective March 1, the restaurant vet will be responsible for global growth and brand strategies.

Synthesia

AI video generation platform, Synthesia, hires Peter Hill as the new CTO. Previous Vice President of Business Applications at AWS, Hill traded in the cloud computing giant for a taste of something new at Wildlife Studios, the gaming company in Seattle. Hill’s role as CTO is pivotal and comes on the heels of Synthesia closing out its series D round at $180 million, 18 months after its series C at $90 million. The company is currently valued at $2.1 billion and supports 140+ languages.

Outreach

The Seattle-based start-up, Outreach, hires Simmons as the new CMO and brings on Nadia Rashid as the CRO. The sales execution platform outperformed revenue goals in 2024 and raked in $300.8 million, up over $90 million from $206.6 million in 2023. Simmons was the previous Senior Vice President at Seismic and has had leadership roles at Oracle and SAP, which complements Nadia's 20-plus years of experience driving revenue growth at multi-million dollar companies.

Sprinklr

With 25 years of experience in global operations across industries, Corso joins Sprinklr as the Chief Administrative Officer. The customer experience management platform posted a 7.7% growth ($200.69 million) in revenue last October, surpassing estimates. JPMorgan Chase’s recent investment in Sprinklr stocks makes the financial services mogul a 0.25% owner, worth a little over $4.8 million. Previous CMO at Vonage, Corso is set to deliver operational efficiency at scale.

Criteo

Criteo’s search has come to an end with the appointment of Komasinski as CEO effective February 15, 2025. Komasinski has quite a bit of work ahead, considering the retail media space was a lot smaller in 2019 when Megan Clarken was hired as CEO. The digital advertising company has to face increased competition, slower industry growth, mergers and acquisitions, and diversify its revenue source from cookie-dependent ad-targeting.

Extrahop

Extrahop hops on to another CEO. The cybersecurity company seems to swap out the role every year and Greer is next up. After receiving $100 million in funding from internal investors, Greer’s appointment comes on the heels of chief revenue and product restructurings. Greer might just break the continuous handover of the CEO role. His previous experience at Broadcom as the general manager and Vice President of the Enterprise Security Group makes him the perfect fit.

Amazon

Former Director of Advertiser Success Engineering at Amazon, Thomas George, and former VP at Microsoft and leader of Amazon’s Alexa efforts, Sirosh, team up as co-founders of CreatorsAGI. A startup that enables creatives to build their own AI agents/companions to communicate their unique abilities and persona.


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