There have been plenty of organizational changes at Microsoft in the past year or so. When long-time Redmond leaders leave, that creates space for new rising stars to show what they can do. Of all the names at the top levels of the org chart, one clearly stands out: Charles Lamanna.

The executive many of us first got to know through PowerApps and Microsoft Flow (yes, the original product names) now has responsibilities reaching across Office, Teams and the Copilot platform underneath Microsoft’s agent ambitions. When I first saw Charles live on stage, it was at Ignite 2018, where he was talking about the new thing called Power Platform “covering all the world with our connectors”:

This was not a high-profile product family yet, and literally no one was talking about the low-code concept at that point. Ryan Cunningham, the CVP of Copilot Studio + Power Platform, posted yesterday on LinkedIn that “the first time I pitched Power Platform to an analyst, they laughed.”

The laughing time is over for analysts, and the people who built Power Platform sure have gone places. Today, Charles is called “the new Office chief who fixed Copilot” in a recent article by The Information:

In this newsletter issue I’ll describe the journey, the current state and the future potential I see in this “Office Chief”. Given the Power Platform background, I think I have perspectives that the Redmond-watching tech press doesn’t: I’ve been following his work from the front row since the days when Power Platform was something few people believed in.

Charles first entered Microsoft straight out of college before he left to do a startup called MetricsHub. Microsoft then acquired MetricsHub in 2013 and Charles subsequently worked in Azure before moving into business applications. In his September 2023 investor interview, he described roughly five years in Azure and five-and-a-half to six years in Business Applications, placing that transition around 2017–2018.

By March 2018, he was publicly presenting PowerApps and Flow as their general manager. The products had launched earlier, in 2015–2016, and their Azure-side dependencies likely put him close to them early on. The remit then broadened from low-code tools to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform as he took the BAG/BAP lead from James Phillips. Once ChatGPT happened and AI became the umbrella for everything Microsoft does, the new organization was named Business & Industry Copilot (BIC).

While Copilot sidecars kept popping up left and right in BizApps products (as mandated by Charles), the organizational boundaries kept moving. In June 2025, BIC moved under Rajesh Jha alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot. March 2026 brought the announcement that Lamanna would become an EVP reporting to Nadella, with the reporting transition scheduled for the end of June/start of July.

The Verge’s May 6 reporting described the Copilot, Agents, and Platform expansion into Microsoft 365 Core, OneDrive/SharePoint and related productivity infrastructure. On October 1, Microsoft announced that Sumit Chauhan and Lan Ye would report to Charles after Ryan Roslansky’s departure decision. Jon Friedman moved to Jacob Andreou and Copilot leadership remains shared.

In my July piece about the new CLT, I already wrote a bit about the meteoric rise of Charles inside Microsoft’s organization. This just keeps on happening and I don’t think it’s just him being lucky. Being the right guy in the right place at the right time? That’s probably more accurate.

Soon after Satya Nadella took over the CEO role, he initiated the restructuring that changed the role of Dynamics products significantly. In 2015, the move of the Dynamics development teams into Scott Guthrie’s Cloud + Enterprise group started the era of mainstreaming Microsoft’s business applications. First came Dynamics 365, and soon after the completely new thing called Power Platform. This is what gave Charles the opportunity to work on something that wasn’t just a thing under Azure, and that didn’t require him to replace ScottGu to gain a kingdom of his own.