Microsoft (MSFT) will report its fiscal third quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, as Wall Street continues to look for signs that the AI explosion is more than just hype. In its prior quarter, Microsoft announced that its AI capabilities contributed 6 percentage points of growth to the company’s Azure revenue, up from 3% in the previous period, and analysts are looking for more.
Shares of Microsoft are up more than 10% year to date, behind rivals such as Google parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN), which are up 15% and 22%, respectively. Over the last 12 months, Microsoft’s shares have climbed 32%, though Amazon has jumped 67%, while Google is up 47%.
Microsoft’s AI ambitions got a healthy boost on Tuesday when it announced that Coca-Cola (KO) signed a five-year, $1.1 billion agreement to use the software giant’s Azure cloud services and AI technology.
Microsoft has unleashed a torrent of new AI features and services for its enterprise and productivity apps and consumer platforms ever since it first debuted its revamped version of Bing and its AI chatbot in February 2023.
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