Early this year, Microsoft created a new division called Microsoft AI led by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI. Following this organizational change, Mikhail Parakhin, who had been leading Microsoft's Advertising and web services teams, including the Copilot team, left his role to explore new opportunities within Microsoft.
Today, Shopify announced that Mikhail Parakhin is joining the company as Chief Technology Officer. Mikhail had two stints at Microsoft. Between 2007 and 2014, he served as an engineer and then as a Partner Development Manager. Between 2019 and 2024, he started as a CVP of Technology and then exited as CEO of Advertising and Web Services. Between these stints, Mikhail was Chief Technology Officer at Yandex, where he developed search engines, cloud services, and digital assistants.
Shopify mentioned the following regarding Mikhail's hiring in the announcement news:
"As CTO, Mikhail will oversee our engineering and data organizations and push Shopify to the cutting edge, not just in ML and AI, but in everything we're building to make commerce better for everyone."
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke wrote the following on X:
Thrilled to get to work with @MParakhin, who is joining as Shopify's new CTO! He's a brilliant technologist, who I've deeply admired for years. Deep expertise in ML, AI, and search at huge scale.
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein wrote the following on LinkedIn about Mikhail:
Mikhail has had an incredible career in machine learning, search, and AI and his influence has made a significant impact across the broader tech industry. He’s the perfect addition to lead our engineering and data teams into the future.
Parakhin's move to Shopify shows they're serious about using technology to grow. With his experience, Shopify could become even better at e-commerce, especially with AI. This is a big change, and it'll be interesting to see what happens next. On a related note, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott recently joined the Shopify board.
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