Microsoft’s quarterly report will be a litmus test for AI – investors have been waiting for financial returns

Microsoft Corporation, which is the largest investor in the OpenAI startup, is making a lot of efforts to monetize joint developments in the field of artificial intelligence, but so far they require significant investments and do not provide a quick payback. This week, for many investors, the publication of Microsoft’s quarterly report in this sense may become a moment of truth.

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Reuters warns about this, citing not the most optimistic expectations of analysts. A survey of the latter showed that Microsoft, based on the results of the last quarter, could demonstrate the most modest growth in quarterly revenue for the year. Investors are also unnerved by Microsoft’s decision in August to change the structure of its financial statements. For experts who have been following its activities for a long time, these changes at first may become an obstacle to an in-depth analysis of the corporation’s financial position.

According to representatives of Visible Alpha, in the last quarter Microsoft increased revenue in the Azure cloud business by 33%, which generally corresponds to the company’s own expectations. However, this is still less than the quarter before. Microsoft’s total revenue last quarter could have risen 14.1% to $64.51 billion, according to a survey of analysts conducted by LSEG. Microsoft’s capital expenditures in the last quarter could have increased by 71.7% to $19.23 billion, largely due to the artificial intelligence segment.

A Gartner survey of 152 IT companies conducted in August showed that the majority of them had not progressed beyond the pilot project stage in implementing Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant. Some analysts hope that Microsoft’s ability to create a more autonomous version of Copilot that interacts less with the cloud will help the service grow in popularity.

Business productivity solutions including Office, LinkedIn and 365 Copilot could boost Microsoft’s revenue by 12% last quarter, according to an LSEG survey. Intelligent cloud systems could increase the corporation’s core revenue by 20%, the same as in the previous quarter. The stabilization of the PC market, in addition, could contribute to some revenue growth in the direction of Windows operating systems and gaming platforms. Microsoft will publish its quarterly reports in the middle of this week.