Microsoft is experiencing strong growth in the area of generative AI. The company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, said late Tuesday that the company’s paying customers for its GitHub Copilot software increased 40% during the third quarter of 2023 compared to the previous quarter.
“We have more than 1 million paid Copilot users in more than 37,000 organizations who subscribe to Copilot for Business,” Nadella said, “with significant traction outside the United States.”
Copilot Chat, recently added to Copilot, is “already used like Shopify, and by leading companies like Maersk and PWC to boost the productivity of their software developers,” Nadella said.
Microsoft Edge gained market share
Copilot is one of many ways Nadella is delivering on its promise to spread artificial intelligence across the company’s product line. But for now, this new AI from Microsoft is available worldwide, except in the European Union, and therefore in France.
Why ? Well because it doesn’t pass the caudine forks of the DMA. Microsoft explains that it is working to find a solution. But it’s not for now.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine, meanwhile, has been integrated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It has allowed users to participate in “more than 1.9 billion chats” so far, Nadella said.
He pointed out that the Microsoft Edge browser has gained market share for 10 consecutive quarters. “This quarter, we introduced new custom responses along with support for DALL-E 3 to help people get more relevant responses and create incredibly realistic images. More than 1.8 billion images have been created to date,” Nadella said.
Bingo on OpenAI
And this AI traction at Microsoft is translating into results.
For the third quarter of 2023, its net profit stood at $22.3 billion, up 27% year-on-year.
Wall Street now expects Microsoft to benefit greatly financially from its partnership with the startup OpenAI, in which it has invested more than ten billion dollars. Some Wall Street analysts estimate that this partnership could one day be worth around a hundred billion dollars to Microsoft.
The cloud powered by AI
Although Mr. Nadella did not quantify revenue from GitHub Copilot, Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said that “higher-than-expected AI consumption contributed to Azure’s revenue growth.”
The company’s total revenue for its cloud computing operations in the quarter beat analysts’ estimates, increasing 19% year over year to $24.3 billion, the company said , compared to the expectations of Wall Street which counted on 23.4 billion dollars. Of that total, Azure activity grew 29%, with 3 percentage points coming from “AI services,” Hood said.
Other uses of Copilot, and more generally of AI, also include the increased use of Copilot via Microsoft’s development tools, the Power Platform. “More than 126,000 organizations, including 3M, PG&E and Toyota, have used Copilot and Power Platform,” Nadella said.
LinkedIn also touched by the grace of AI
Nadella noted that “more than 18,000 organizations are now using the Azure OpenAI service, including new Azure customers, and we are expanding our reach with leading digital businesses with OpenAI APIs, as leading startups in “AIs use OpenAI to power their AI solutions, which also makes them customers of Azure.”
The company is adding generative AI to its LinkedIn business, including a “learning coach that gives members personalized content guidelines and tools,” rolling out last quarter. “We saw a nearly 80% increase in members watching AI-related learning courses this quarter” on LinkedIn, Nadella said.
Mr. Nadella also drew attention to the spread of Copilot across various industries, particularly in healthcare, where the company integrates clinical tools into its Fabric data service on Azure. Among these tools, DAX Copilot, used to transcribe clinical notes, “increases physician productivity and reduces burnout,” Mr. Nadella said.
The rollout of GitHub Copilot and other tools is in its early stages, Nadella said. “We’re just at the very beginning, and we look forward to seeing the interest in these products in the future,” he said. The early use of Copilot, he added, “gives us confidence, and our customers, more importantly, confidence in what these products represent in terms of value.”
Source: “ZDNet.com”