AI Offerings Drive Microsoft to Record Quarter

Microsoft said its artificial intelligence (AI) companion, Copilot, is being adopted across industries.

This and other AI offerings helped drive the company to a record quarter during the three months ended Dec. 31, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said Tuesday (Jan. 30) during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

“We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale,” Nadella said. “By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we’re winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains.”

Azure AI, Microsoft’s resource that provides access to AI models, now has 53,000 customers — and over one-third of them are new customers who have adopted this solution over the last 12 months, Nadella said.

GitHub Copilot, the company’s AI developer tool, now has 1.3 million paid subscribers — up 30% from the previous quarter. In addition, GitHub Copilot Business is used by more than 50,000 organizations.

Power Platform, Microsoft’s low-code and no-code development offering, has found that more than 230,000 organizations have used its AI capabilities — 80% more than did so in the previous quarter.

Copilot Studio, which enables customers to create their own AI companions, has been used by more than 10,000 organizations.

DAX Copilot, which was built for the healthcare industry, is being used by more than 100 healthcare systems.

“A growing body of evidence makes clear the role AI will play in transforming work,” Nadella said after sharing these numbers during the call.

For example, early adopters of Copilot for Microsoft 365 proved to be 29% faster in searching, writing, summarizing and similar tasks, Nadella said. In some other work tasks that he didn’t specify, Microsoft has found that generative AI delivers improvements in productivity of up to 70%.

In the PC segment of the business, Copilot in Windows is now available on more than 75 million Windows PCs.

“In 2024, AI will become a first-class part of every PC,” Nadella said.

AI is also transforming Microsoft’s search and browser offerings. For example, the company’s AI-powered tools have created 5 billion images and conducted 5 billion chats. Both of those figures are double what they were in the previous quarter.

“And both Bing and Edge took share this quarter,” Nadella said.

Concluding the company’s prepared remarks during the call, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said: “In closing, we are focused on execution so our customers can realize the benefits of AI productivity gains as we invest to lead this AI platform wave.”