Microsoft Moves GitHub Into CoreAI Group, CEO Confirms Upcoming Departure

‘GitHub has never been stronger than it is today,’ GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said.

Microsoft is moving its GitHub suite of developer tools and an early breakout for the tech giant’s artificial intelligence use cases into the CoreAI engineering organization formed this year–and GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke, is leaving Microsoft at the end of 2025.

Dohmke revealed that he is leaving Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft in a blog post Monday, which also noted that “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon.”

“With more than 1B repos and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today,” the CEO said. “We have seen more open-source projects with more contributions every year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone. And our presence in companies of any size is unmatched in the market.”

Microsoft Moves GitHub

CRN has reached out to GitHub and Microsoft for comment.

Dawn Sizer, CEO of Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based 3rd Element Consulting—an honoree on CRN’s 2025 MSP 500–told CRN in an interview that bringing GitHub closer to the rest of the product suite is a smart move by the vendor to get developers to adopt more products across Microsoft’s portfolio.

“Your earnings as Microsoft would skyrocket” if you can target developers with traditional Microsoft programmer tools and Copilot, Sizer said.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has boasted publicly about the gains made in GitHub’s Copilot programming AI offer as an early use case for where AI can help organizations save time and increase productivity.

On Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings call held July 30, Nadella said that GitHub Copilot now has 20 million users, the number of GitHub Copilot enterprise customers increased 75 percent quarter over quarter and that 90 percent of the Fortune 100 now use GitHub Copilot.

AI projects on GitHub more than doubled over the last year, and the code review agent performs millions of code reviews each month, Nadella said on the call.

Back in January 2023, Nadella called GitHub Copilot “the first at-scale AI product built for this era.” Back then, GitHub Copilot had more than 1 million users to date.

Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion. Dohmke took over as CEO in 2021 after previously serving as chief product officer for about four months and vice president of strategic programs for about three years, according to his LinkedIn account.

He was a Microsoft employee moved into GitHub leadership after its close, but had been a GitHub user since 2009 and came to Microsoft with the acquisition of HockeyApp, an application-testing software startup Dohmke co-founded and led as CEO, according to a CNBC article written when Dohmke took the top spot at GitHub.

GitHub Copilot was introduced in June 2021. Microsoft 365 Copilot became generally available in 2023. Dohmke said in his Monday blog post that he and his team “launched and scaled Copilot from a simple, but magical autocompletion tool to conversational coding with Copilot Chat & Voice, to reviewing and fixing code, to full-stack app creation with GitHub Spark” and now to Microsoft’s first multi-model offer.

Dohmke said that his “startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again” in his explanation for leaving Microsoft and GitHub.

During his GitHub tenure, he brought GitHub to Europe and Australia, reduced mean time-to-remediation by 60 percent through GitHub Advanced Security and brought GitHub Actions to 3 billion minutes per month.

As for the “CoreAI – Platform and Tools” group GitHub is joining, Microsoft introduced it in January of this year. The group is headed up by Facebook’s former head of engineering, Jay Parikh.

Microsoft’s original post about CoreAI hinted at GitHub’s eventual move to the group by saying the group will not only “bring together Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive)” but 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.”

The group’s goal is “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 the post, with the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure offer becoming the infrastructure for AI with Microsoft developer tools built on top of it and platform and tools coming together to power AI agents.