Photo Credit: Atiyeh M on Unsplash

Yesterday Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced its third quarter results that surpassed market expectations. The performance helped drive its stock 5% higher in the after-hours trading session.

Microsoft’s Financials

Microsoft’s third quarter revenues grew 13% to $70.07 billion, beating analyst estimates of $68.42 billion. EPS of $3.46 exceeded analyst estimates of $3.22 per share.

Microsoft’s commercial cloud revenues came in at $42.4 billion, ahead of expected $42.2 billion. Its Productivity and Business Processes segment revenues grew 10% to $29.9 billion compared to expectations of $29.6 billion. Intelligent Cloud and Azure revenues grew 21% to $26.8 billion. It’s More Personal Computing segment revenue grew 6% to $13.4 billion, ahead of $12.6 billion expectations.

Microsoft’s AI Enhancements

Microsoft continues to remain committed to its AI initiatives and announced that it will invest $80 billion on the initiative in this fiscal year alone. Earlier this week, the company had announced that 20%-30% of its code was written by AI. Microsoft believes that in the next 5 years, 95% of the code would be AI-generated.

During the quarter, Microsoft enhanced its Copilot offerings. Copilot now allows for users to use everyday language to perform advanced analytics. It has been trained to write Python code for users and is helping deliver deeper insights.

Copilot has been embedded in almost all Microsoft offerings. Within Excel, it is helping users get deeper insights, visualize data and even get formula suggestions for complicated formulae. Within its presentation offering, Copilot’s helps users with building a narrative through its Narrative Builder. Users can now create a draft with the right flow and the right information through Copilot. Within the IT admin area, Copilot is being used to streamline routine tasks and generate insights for better decision-making. Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers is helping IT admins understand and optimize their Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

It is also improving its hardware offerings with Copilot + PCs. Copilot+ PCs were introduced last May but have seen significant improvements in the recent quarters. These PCs are now among the fastest, intelligent, and secure Windows PCs ever built with exclusive AI experiences like Recall, Click To Do, and improved Windows Search.

Recall addresses one of the most common user needs of picking up where one left off. Recall transforms how users search for and rediscover content on their PC by retrieving digital memory and allowing users to retrace their steps faster and in a more secure manner.

Click to Do provides contextual shortcuts to relevant actions allowing users to summarize, rewrite or copy text or images they see on screen to help them work more efficiently. The improved Windows search now allows users to describe what they are looking for and Windows will understand and find it for them.

Its stock is currently trading at $394.04 with a market capitalization of $2.9 trillion. It hit a 52-week high of $468.35 in July last year and has recovered from the 52-week low of $344.79 that it had fallen to earlier this month.

More By This Author:

Cloud Stocks: Analysis Of ServiceNow’s Logik.AI Acquisition
Cloud Stocks: Analysis Of Google’s Wiz Acquisition
Cloud Stocks: IBM’s AI Services Focus