Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman is a British AI entrepreneur who leads Microsoft AI, the division responsible for Copilot and Microsoft's consumer-facing artificial intelligence products. He co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 alongside Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, where he led applied AI work before the company's acquisition by Google in 2014, and subsequently held policy and applied AI leadership roles at Google.

In 2022 Suleyman co-founded Inflection AI, a startup focused on building a personal AI assistant called Pi, positioned around emotionally intelligent conversation. In March 2024, Microsoft hired Suleyman and much of Inflection's research team in an unusual licensing-and-hiring arrangement, installing him as chief executive of the newly formed Microsoft AI organisation reporting directly to chief executive Satya Nadella.

At Microsoft, Suleyman has pushed the company's Copilot products deeper into everyday consumer use, unveiling new AI models and features at events such as Microsoft Build 2026, while publicly warning about the pace and governability of AI development. He has argued that society should not build AI systems that claim or appear to have genuine consciousness, and has called for guardrails around 'seemingly conscious AI'.

Suleyman is also known as an author, co-writing 'The Coming Wave' (2023), a widely discussed book on the societal risks of advanced AI and synthetic biology, in which he argued for a new framework of containment to manage dual-use technologies. He has predicted that a large share of white-collar knowledge work could be substantially automated within a matter of years, a claim that has drawn both interest and scepticism.

Combining a research pedigree from DeepMind, entrepreneurial experience at Inflection, and now a senior executive role steering one of the world's largest technology companies' AI strategy, Suleyman occupies a distinctive position as both an AI industry insider and one of its more publicly cautious voices.