Microsoft’s customer experience business achieved over $1 billion in annual sales.
The software giant’s cloud segment brought in $30.3 billion, which was a key driver behind beating overall revenue expectations for its final quarter of 2023.
Customer experience’s success was replicated by its service, and finance and supply chain, which each raked in more than $1 billion in annual sales, with Dynamics hitting $5 billion.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, said: “Organizations are asking not only how – but how fast – they can apply this next generation of AI to address the biggest opportunities and challenges they face – safely and responsibly.
“We remain focused on leading the new AI platform shift, helping customers use the Microsoft Cloud to get the most value out of their digital spend, and driving operating leverage.”
Copilot was front and centre from a product perspective, integrating and adapting its AI capabilities to Dynamics 365 and other parts of the business, including Microsoft Sales, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Azure, Power Platform, Windows, Security, and the web.
Nadella announced on the quarterly earnings call that Copilot Stack is available from today on Azure.
This includes everything from the Azure AI toolchain, such as Azure OpenAI, and all the essential elements of its operational data stores to apply generative AI technology for an array of purposes, like responding to customers or summarising meetings.
Microsoft Sales Copilot is a relatively recent addition to the wave of Copilot applications, announced earlier this month at Microsoft Inspire by Nadella.
The app assists salespeople in their tasks across Dynamics 365 Sales, Outlook, and Teams to increase productivity and provide personalised customer conversations by enabling sellers to base their customer interaction on data from CRM systems, including Salesforce and Dynamics.
This was affirmed at the quarterly earnings call by Nadella who envisages Sales Copilot, as well as M365 Copilot and Service Copilot, having “very high productivity gains”, which have already been seen in GitHub Copilot.
M365 Copilot, which was rolled out four months ago, now has 600 paid customers via its early access programme. Emirates NBD, General Motors, Goodyear, and Lumen were named as a few of these whose feedback reportedly adds support to the notion of it being a “game changer” for employee productivity.
Microsoft 365 E5 was a stand-out product within Microsoft’s commercial segment, which Amy Hood, CFO of Microsoft, described as having a “healthy renewal strength”.
Speaking on Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, Nadella commented:
“One of our tools that has really taken off is Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, which is delivering one of the biggest benefits of this new era of AI: helping customer service agents be significantly more productive.
“HP and Virgin Money, for example, have both built custom chatbots with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents that were trained to answer complex customer inquiries.”
In total, 63,000 organisations have used AI-powered capabilities in Power Platform, which represents a 75 percent increase quarter-over-quarter.
Power Automate has now hit ten million monthly active users, which is an increase of 55 percent year-over-year.
It would be hard to argue that Microsoft’s results are not decent overall when you consider the market challenges it has faced, ultimately resulting in layoffs.
Nevertheless, its results are not as strong as this time last year and the company’s shares are down, perhaps due to slower growth in Azure’s cloud revenue than the previous quarter.
