New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has restructured the company with a flattened leadership hierarchy and appointed a dedicated AI chief.

Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, is streamlining the semiconductor giant's leadership team as part of his first major moves since taking the top job last month. According to a memo from Tan reviewed by Reuters, important chip groups will now report directly to him, marking a significant restructuring of the company's executive hierarchy. Intel's data center and AI chip group, as well as its personal-computer chip group, will report directly to Tan under the new arrangement.

In a key executive promotion, Sachin Katti, who previously led the company's networking chip operations, has been elevated to chief technology officer and artificial intelligence chief. Katti, who is also a professor at Stanford University, will succeed Greg Lavender, who is retiring from Intel. Michelle Johnston Holthaus remains chief executive of Intel products, and Tan indicated her role will expand with more details to come in the future.

Tan framed the restructuring as an effort to address what he views as serious organizational impediments to innovation. "It's clear to me that organizational complexity and bureaucratic processes have been slowly suffocating the culture of innovation we need to win," Tan wrote in the memo. "It takes too long to make decisions. New ideas are not given room or resources to incubate. And unnecessary silos lead to inefficient execution." The CEO explained his decision to have engineering and product teams report to him directly, stating: "I want to roll up my sleeves with the engineering and product teams so I can learn what's needed to strengthen our solutions."

The leadership restructuring reflects Tan's publicly stated objective of trimming layers of management to enable closer collaboration between executive leadership and engineers. By consolidating reporting lines and reducing organizational complexity, Tan is positioning Intel to operate with greater agility and speed in decision-making, particularly in the competitive domains of data center, AI chips, and personal computers.