Here's a recap of CEO Satya Nadella's updates from Microsoft's Q4 earnings call on all things AI.
Azure AI growth and adoption
Nadella announced that Microsoft's cloud business, including Azure AI services, has surpassed $110 billion, driven by the adoption of AI. "Every customer I speak with is asking not only how but how fast they can apply next-generation AI to address the biggest opportunities and challenges they face and to do so safely and responsibly," Nadella said.
He also reported strong adoption of the Azure OpenAI service, with more than 11,000 organizations across industries using the service and nearly 100 new customers per day launching AI-first workloads this quarter.
AI and Data
Data and analytics platforms are the foundation of AI applications, Nadella said. He highlighted Microsoft's growing market share with its cloud analytics solutions. Nadella also touted Microsoft Fabric, a holistic offering that brings together compute, storage and governance to power AI workloads.
AI and developers
In terms of AI tools, Nadella highlighted Microsoft's Copilot on Power Virtual Agents and GitHub Copilot for Business, which grew 2x quarter-over-quarter, as top choices for AI development. He shared that more than 27,000 organizations use GitHub Copilot, while more than 63,000 organizations have "used" AI capabilities in Power platform.
AI and business applications
Nadella talked about the penetration of AI into business applications, such as Dynamics 365. He pointed to new copilots for finance, operations, and sales that are designed to transform business processes.
AI and productivity
In addition to productivity apps, Nadella touted Windows Copilot, which is designed to help all Windows 11 users with natural language capabilities. Security Copilot, which uses AI for security operations, is touted as a big launch this fall, with more than 600 paid customers already testing Microsoft 365 Copilot.
LinkedIn AI and Bing Chat Enterprise
Nadella highlights AI-powered collaborative articles on LinkedIn, which are now the platform's "fastest-growing traffic driver," whatever that means. Nadella also mentioned Bing's B2B expansion with Bing Chat Enterprise and Bing's integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT as a search engine. To date, Bing users have engaged in more than 1 billion chats and created more than 750 million images with Bing Image Creator.
AI infrastructure investments
According to CFO Amy Hood, the company's investments will increase to meet growing demand for AI infrastructure, resulting in higher COGS growth than in FY2023, but operating margins will be flat year-over-year.
