GitHub CEO resigns, leadership integrated more into Microsoft CoreAI

By Alvin Wu
Business
GitHub CEO resigns, leadership integrated more into Microsoft CoreAI

Invertocat logo graphic. GITHUB/Handout

Dec. 27 (ZFJ) — GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke resigned on Aug. 11, with the platform’s leadership now more integrated into Microsoft’s CoreAI team.

In an internal memo sent to employees of the code repository service, Dohmke announced his decision to leave GitHub to become a startup founder again. He said that “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon” and added that he’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help with transitioning.

When GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, the CEO at the time, Nat Friedman, emphasized in a blog post that “GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business.”

In a step in the opposite direction of Friedman’s original sentiment, Dohmke’s resignation means GitHub employees will no longer have their own CEO to answer to.

Microsoft’s CoreAI team was launched January 2025 “with the mission to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents,” according to a memo to employees from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announcing the engineering organization’s creation. “This group will also build out GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the leading AI-first product and the AI platform to motivate the stack and its roadmap.”

GitHub Copilot is an AI programming tool.

CoreAI is led by Jay Parikh, former Facebook global head of engineering and current Microsoft executive vice president of CoreAI — platform and tools. Parikh’s job is to make sure Microsoft has “the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure,” per Nadella.

A Business Insider report from October based on audio of an internal Microsoft meeting indicates that the company wants GitHub’s AI tools to become ubiquitous in software development, whether it be in the command line interface or IDEs, and thus compete against other AI coding tools.

Parikh is quoted in the report saying, “GitHub is just not the place anymore where developers are storing code. We want it to be the center of gravity for all of AI-powered software development."

Parikh reiterated this sentiment the same month in an interview with a reporter from The Verge.

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