Intrapreneurship, Leadership, Product Development, AI/ML, Acquisitions

Yu-Ting Kuo is a Corporate Vice President in the Technology and Research Group at Microsoft. In this role, he works on cross-company technical and strategic initiatives with a current focus on environment-aware machine learning and AI platform scaling.

Previously, Yu-Ting founded and oversaw Microsoft’s Computer Vision Engineering Group, where he managed a global engineering and science organization that developed state-of-the-art technologies in the areas of computer vision and mixed reality. He also helped found Microsoft’s AI R&D Center in Taipei, and Mixed Reality and AI Labs in Zurich, Belgrade, and Cambridge (UK), where the company works on advanced machine learning and computer vision capabilities.

In 2016, Yu-Ting led Microsoft’s acquisition of London-based SwiftKey, the top AI-powered mobile keyboard, and served as its post-acquisition manager. In 2015, he founded the project initiative that would eventually become Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services, the first publicly available suite of AI services for developers, helping democratize AI technology for the industry and reaching over one million developer customers.

Previously, Yu-Ting served as Technical Advisor to the Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s AI and Research Group, where he led technical strategy, planning, incubation, and strategic prototyping. He is the recipient of the Inaugural Chinese Institute of Engineering/USA-SEA Asian American Luminary Award in Science and Engineering Innovation in 2018 for his pioneering work in Cloud AI services, and holds a number of U.S. and international patents on internet search and AI technologies.

Yu-Ting joined Microsoft from McKinsey & Company in 1996 as a technical evangelist. He attended National Tsing Hua University, Stanford University, University of Oxford, and MIT. He was elected a distinguished alumnus of the College of Science,  National Tsing Hua University, and an overseas member of the Tsing Hua Entrepreneur Network in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

Outside of work, ​he is an avid collector of Star Wars Lego sets and mechanical keyboards and serves on the alumni board of MIT Sloan. He and his family live in the Seattle area.