Since 2019, Christian Gero (MBA ’19) has been scaling artificial intelligence efforts at Microsoft while simultaneously championing responsible use of the technology.
He’s held numerous roles within the company spanning sales, product management, and innovation. He helped run the company’s flagship Azure Machine Learning platform, led product strategy for Microsoft Foundry’s model catalog—including access to over 11,000 foundation models—and now drives customer adoption of the company’s entire AI portfolio, enabling organizations to create custom-built agentic applications and other AI solutions.
As an undergraduate music major with an interest in technology, Christian began his career with a Grammy Award-winning record label in Chicago. He’d later work for an event production company and launch his own business before setting his sights on an MBA program. “I wanted to get a solid data-driven framework to making business decisions,” he says. “I have a couple of friends who got their MBAs at Wisconsin, and they all told me it was a really great program, it was affordable, and the return on investment was huge.”
At WSB, Christian augmented his experience through an enterprise development fellowship with the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship. He also enrolled in a PhD-level class outside of the school, which involved building machine learning models to simulate the workings of the human brain.
“I was the only business student in that class,” he says. “That really unlocked something for me where I was like, hey, I love being in rooms where other people are smarter than me.”