Taylor Black

A philosophy PhD running breakthrough innovation at Microsoft — on why trying to be a visionary kills innovation.

Philosopher-operator and storyteller. Humanistic, a little contrarian about corporate orthodoxy.

Taylor Black is director of AI and Venture Ecosystems in Microsoft's Office of the CTO, where he builds the machinery by which a very large organization produces breakthroughs without crushing them. In 2025 he was also named founding director of a new interdisciplinary AI institute at The Catholic University of America, which he leads while continuing at Microsoft. He came to all this through philosophy and classics at Gonzaga and a master's in cognitional theory at Boston College, and he founded Command Line as a platform for builders to tell their own stories.

Incubation is professionalized unknowing. His job is to commit money and people decisively while having no way to know which bets will pay, which turns emergence and improvisation into strategy rather than excuses.

He'll be talking about designing for emergence, and about keeping a human story alive inside a hyperscaler — a question he is now pursuing from inside big tech and inside a university at the same time.

You'll take away: permission to stop pretending you have a roadmap, and a method for what to do instead. Especially useful if you are in innovation and strategy or an entrepreneur looking for the next big thing. In other words, you're the person expected to have the five-year plan for something that did not exist five years ago.

ONE READ — "Innovation Leader at Microsoft to Direct New AI Institute," Catholic University. A long interview covering his formation, the institute, and what he thinks universities are for.