Overview
- Microsoft’s stock has fallen more than 20% this year, with coverage noting its worst quarter since 2008, as investors question the payoff from its AI push.
- The core business remains healthy, with the latest quarter showing revenue up 17% to $81.3 billion, adjusted earnings per share up 24%, and Azure cloud revenue up 39%.
- Copilot has drawn criticism for a high price and uneven answers, and it counts about 15 million subscriptions against roughly 450 million paid commercial seats for Microsoft’s productivity apps.
- Microsoft is shifting Copilot to a multi-model setup, adding early-access tools like Council to compare ChatGPT and Claude side by side and Critique to generate a ChatGPT output that Claude then checks for errors.
- AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft plans its own state-of-the-art models by 2027, a goal that follows rising enterprise traction for rivals like Anthropic’s Claude and could reduce reliance on outside providers.