Joseph Sirosh, chief technological officer for AI at Microsoft, has seen enough of computers and traded it for real estate. Only this week, the Microsoft officer traded computers for soil as he accepted the same position with a different company. Sirosh is now connected with Compass, a real estate firm operating out of New York.
The former CTO of Microsoft AI joined the Redmond-based company in July 2013, according to The Register UK. Previously, Sirosh was connected with Amazon, working with the online retailer for eight years.
In Microsoft, he held a collection of positions before landing as the CTO for AI. He was corporate VP for Information Management and Machine Learning and then head of Data Platform. Unofficially, he was said to have been integral in the development of SQL Server on Linux as well as facilitating big data transfer processes in the cloud, having a hand in the creation of Azure Data Lake.
The AI CTO job, and the department in general, is still vacant. Last month, Javier Soltero, Microsoft's VP for AI assistant Cortana, left for better opportunities as well.
Sirosh's work with Compass will be focused on creating new AI-powered products to be used in real estate. In essence, he's still continuing original work that he did for Microsoft-only at another capacity, and in another company. Compass is currently serving a number of cities in the US, owing to its tag of being "among the country's largest-owned luxury brokerages," cited ZD Net. It also aims to use Sirosh's knowledge to develop processes that will speed up real estate transactions, a trend that's been gaining ground recently.
Microsoft, for its part, has been restructuring its AI teams. Most of its personnel has been moved from other departments right into product groups focused on commercial distribution. Sirosh and Soltero's departure appeared to be only the beginning.
Corporate VP of AI+ Research Lili Cheng, responsible for bot/bot framework teams, and Soltero's former Cortana team, were removed from their respective places. They were then placed under Executive VP Rajesh Jha's Experiences & Devices organization, a department that appears to be connected with researching programs for Microsoft's consumer devices.
With this move, only time will tell whether real estate has a big gain from Sirosh's experiences at Microsoft. The software giant, for one, will have to continue finding the replacements for both Joseph Sirosh and Javier Soltero.
