Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella listen to an audience member question during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Wash., on November 30, 2016.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Microsoft shares were trading down as much as 5% on Wednesday, a day after the software maker issued worse-than-expected quarterly revenue guidance. Many analysts remained optimistic about the company’s prospects, but a few fretted about how recent investments in artificial intelligence won’t immediately come to fruition.
Growth in AI has the potential to propel Microsoft’s two largest businesses: the Azure public cloud and the more traditional, and market-leading, Office productivity software.
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Microsoft has been increasing its capital expenditures to get infrastructure in place to provide AI services to developers at other companies and roll out assistant capabilities to apps such as Word and Outlook. The extra spending cuts into Microsoft’s cloud gross margin.
Last week, Microsoft said its Copilot assistant for these Microsoft 365 applications would cost $30 per person per month on top of regular subscription prices. The company did not say when it would start charging. On Tuesday’s call, Amy Hood, Microsoft’s finance chief, said growth from AI services would be “gradual” as Azure AI tools gain in popularity and Copilots such as the one for Microsoft 365 become generally available. She said that for the current 2024 fiscal year, which will end in June 2024, the impact would mainly come in the second half.
Some investors will probably have to change their expectations on revenue as a result of Hood’s comments, JPMorgan analysts led by Mark Murphy, with a buy rating on Microsoft stock, wrote in a Wednesday note.
“The messaging on Copilot was more about tempering rather than inflating expectations,” wrote UBS analysts led by Karl Keirstead, which also has a buy rating on Microsoft.
Members of the public became captivated by the ChatGPT chatbot from startup OpenAI, which relies on Azure, after its release in late 2022. It’s a prominent example of generative AI, which accepts human input such as text or an image and automatically creates content in response. Companies selling productivity software, including Atlassian, have been hurrying to incorporate such generative features into their products, and delays in Microsoft’s release of its all-important Office suite could mean missing out on a clear growth opportunity.
“Overall, while it will take some additional time for the revenue to materialize, we expect MSFT, with its increasingly unique set of AI-infused Cloud services, is well positioned take share across its numerous operating segments in the coming years,” Stifel analysts led by Brad Reback, with a buy rating on the stock, wrote in a note distributed to clients.
Raymond James’ Andrew Marok and Mauricio Munoz, with the equivalent of a buy rating on Microsoft shares, had a similar tone.
“While the contribution may not come as quickly as hoped as AI-enabled products are tested, deployed, and eventually used at scale, MSFT’s position as an AI leader remains unblemished by today’s report,” they wrote.
Even if the clear growth probably won’t show up in 2023, during the call with analysts on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that when it comes to new AI workloads in the cloud, Microsoft is in the lead.
Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in Russell Building on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, September 13, 2023.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
IBM said Tuesday that it will lay off a small percentage of its employees in the current quarter.
“In the fourth quarter we are executing an action that will impact a low single-digit percentage of our global workforce,” a spokesperson told CNBC. “While this may impact some U.S.-based roles, we anticipate that our U.S. employment will remain flat year over year.”
IBM employed 270,000 people at the end of 2024, according to its latest annual report. A 1% cut to headcount would represent the loss of 2,700 jobs.
Other technology companies have been slimming down lately, with executives looking for ways to improve productivity by increasing reliance on artificial intelligence tools.
On Oct. 22, IBM delivered stronger earnings than expected, thanks to a 10% jump in revenue from software, meeting consensus.
CEO Arvind Krishna has helped IBM expand its revenue base since he replaced Ginni Rometty in 2020.
The hardware, software and services provider said goodbye to some marketing and communications staff members in March 2024.
AI agents took over the work of about 200 people in human resources, leading the company to bring on more salespeople and software developers, Krishna told The Wall Street Journal in May.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, arrives at court as lawyers push to persuade the judge overseeing his fraud case not to jail him ahead of trial, at a courthouse in New York, August 11, 2023.
Eduardo Munoz | Reuters
The judges in a federal appeals court in New York on Tuesday were skeptical of arguments by a lawyer for Sam Bankman-Fried that his conviction for a multi-billion-dollar fraud related to his cryptocurrency exchange FTX and an associated hedge fund should be tossed out.
Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, was almost immediately and then repeatedly interrupted by the three-judge panel on the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals as she tried to make her case that SBF deserved a new trial because the first one was “fundamentally unfair.”
“From my reading of the record, [there was] very substantial evidence of guilt,” Judge Barringon Parker told Shapiro.
“Are you seriously suggesting to us that if your client had been able to testify about the role that attorneys played in preparing these various documents, the not-guilty verdicts would have rolled in?” Parker asked, as Bankman-Fried’s parents looked on from the courtroom gallery.
Bankman-Fried, 33, was convicted in November 2023 of seven criminal counts for fraud against customers of FTX and lenders to the hedge fund Alameda Research. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Defense lawyer Alexandra Shapiro makes oral arguments before United States Circuit Judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Barington D. Parker Jr., Eunice C. Lee and Maria Araujo Kahn during former cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal of his fraud conviction in New York City, U.S., November 4, 2025 in a courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Shapiro argued that rulings by the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, which included limiting what SBF could testify about, unfairly favored prosecutors.
That “allowed the prosecution to present this morally compelling tale, but prevented the defense from showing that the story wasn’t true,” she said.
“The defense was cut off at the knees by the judge’s rulings,” Shapiro told the panel.
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She said prosecutors were allowed to falsely argue at trial that customers and lenders had lost billions of dollars, and would never be able to recover that money.
In reality, she said, it was her understanding that 98% of all FTX creditors have received 120% of their investments plus interest, and that the FTX estate has already paid $8 billion to creditors and another $1 billion in legal fees. She added that there is another $8 billion left to cover $2 billion in remaining claims.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thane Rehn spent the bulk of his time during the hearing answering questions by the judge over how an $11 billion forfeiture against SBF is structured, and what will happen to that forfeiture order if all victims are made whole before the entire amount is spent.
OpenAI on Tuesday launched its Sora app of AI-generated videos for Android devices.
The artificial intelligence company first launched Sora for Apple devices in September. The announcement on Tuesday brings the popular AI app to the Google Play app store for users in the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Sora reportedly hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its debut, and it topped Apple’s App Store for nearly three weeks. Sora currently holds the no. 5 spot on Apple’s list of the top free apps, behind Google’s Gemini at no. 4 and ChatGP, which is also made by OpenAI, in the top spot.
OpenAI is working on making the app available in Europe, according to a post on X from Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI.
The app allows users to create AI-generated videos through written prompts, then post those videos onto a shared feed, similar to that of TikTok. Although initially rolled out as an invite-only platform, Sora is now available to anyone for a limited time, according to an OpenAI post on X.