Microsoft has hired Carolina Dybeck Happe as an executive vice president and chief operations officer, a role created for the former GE chief financial officer, according to a memo sent to employees Thursday.

Dybeck Happe will also join CEO Satya Nadella’s senior leadership team, reporting to him. Nadella’s note to employees emphasized Microsoft’s continued efforts in artificial intelligence, saying that Dybeck Happe’s hire is another example of the company seizing “the opportunity to reinvent” itself.

“I’ve come to admire Carolina through her work as a global business leader, including most recently her role in leading GE’s historic turnaround,” Nadella said in the memo. She will help the leadership team “drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners.”

Dybeck Happe was chief financial officer at GE from March 2020 through September 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. Before GE, she was the chief financial officer of global shipping giant Maersk in Copenhagen, Denmark. Before that she spent 17 years at Stockholm, Sweden-based lock company Assa Abloy.

She has a master’s degree in business and economics from Uppsala University in Sweden.

During her time at GE, the company announced plans to break up into three separate companies focused on health care, aviation and energy. The energy and aerospace companies launched in April and started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

With her hire, Microsoft will shuffle the organizations under its leadership. The commerce and ecosystems organization in cloud and AI, now under its executive vice president Scott Guthrie, will transition to Dybeck Happe. She’ll also take over Microsoft’s digital IT team and its business operations organization.

The appointment is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Microsoft this year. In March, Microsoft announced that it had hired two founders from AI startup Inflection to lead its AI organizations. One of the founders, Mustafa Suleyman, was named as Microsoft AI CEO.

Several of the company’s AI organizations consolidated under the new AI leadership.

Microsoft last had a chief operating officer about a decade ago, but has not filled a similar role since Kevin Turner left in 2016. Before his time at Microsoft, Turner was the CEO of Sam’s Club, a Walmart division.

Dybeck Happe, previously based in Boston, purchased a home in Medina three months ago, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

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