Microsoft CEO Nadella is launching a new CoreAI group led by Jay Parikh

Microsoft is launching a new group focused on developing AI apps and providing tools to third-party customers, the company announced Monday.

The new group will be led by Jay Parikh, the former CEO of cybersecurity startup Lacework and former global head of engineering at Meta. The group will be called “Core AI – Platform and Tools,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a memo to employees that was also published as a blog post. The mission, he said, is “to build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for our first- and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents.”

The announcement comes 10 months after Microsoft tapped DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its Copilot AI initiatives. In this role, Suleyman is Executive Vice President and reports directly to Nadella.

In his post Monday, Nadella said Parikh will work closely with Suleyman as well as cloud head Scott Guthrie, technology chief Kevin Scott and other top tech executives at the company. Parikh joined Microsoft in October as executive vice president, also reporting to the CEO.

Artificial intelligence has become the main topic in the technology space since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and Microsoft has been at the center of the boom as a lead investor in OpenAI. Microsoft relies on OpenAI’s large language models for internal AI use when it comes to areas such as content generation and code creation, and also acts as the startup’s primary cloud partner.

At the same time, Microsoft is developing products and tools that compete with some OpenAI services. Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in its SEC filings, and Nadella used the phrase “collaborative tension” when discussing the relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley in a podcast released last month.

“Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and our competitors,” Nadella wrote in Monday’s memo.

The new group will bring together people working on developer and AI platforms as well as teams from the CTO’s office, Nadella said.

“Our success in this next phase will depend on having the best AI platform, tools and infrastructure,” he wrote.

Parikh joined Microsoft from Lacework, a fast-growing and high-profile startup that was valued at $8.3 billion in 2022, seven years after its founding. However, the company’s fortunes turned when the market turned away from risk and Lacework was forced to drastically reduce its workforce in order to become profitable. In August, security software provider Fortinet completed its acquisition of Lacework for $149 million.

—CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.