The head of Microsoft AI has personally poached at least 24 staffers over the past few months, most of them from DeepMind. He’s been calling up ex-colleagues directly, pitching a leaner, nimbler workplace and the chance to build out Copilot into something more formidable.

According to insiders, Suleyman has offered higher pay than DeepMind, along with the promise of smaller teams and less bureaucracy. The new hires will focus on consumer-facing products, including Copilot, which Microsoft is embedding more deeply into search tools on its Edge browser.

One recent hire, former DeepMind executive Amar Subramanya, posted on LinkedIn, “The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition.”

Suleyman spent nine years at DeepMind before being given free rein by Microsoft boss Satya Nadella to build an AI group that can keep pace with anyone. His team works mostly out of Mountain View and London, far from Microsoft’s main offices.

DeepMind has swollen to around 6,000 employees as it took centre stage in Google’s AI strategy. Two recent hires told reporters they were keen to escape what had become a slow, hierarchical setup bogged down by layers of process.

The recruiting war is just one front in the wider scramble for AI dominance. Tech giants and startups alike are throwing around massive pay deals and investing billions in infrastructure to gain an edge.

Microsoft confirmed that its senior leaders have equal freedom to build and manage their teams. Pay offers for these new recruits have not reached the stratospheric levels seen elsewhere, but they’ve been comfortably ahead of what was on offer at DeepMind, particularly for longer-serving staff.