Latest news with #M365Copilot
India Today
9 hours ago
- Business
- India Today
Government workers in the UK used AI to do their jobs, here is what they found
A recent trial involving 20,000 civil service workers in the UK has found that artificial intelligence tools, when integrated into daily workflows, can save government employees an average of 26 minutes a day, equivalent to roughly 13 working days a year. 'The objective of this experiment was to understand the value that an AI tool such as M365 Copilot would bring when deployed across a large portion of the UK government. Value was defined as improvements in efficiency, task completion rates, and overall user satisfaction,' the report findings are part of a three-month pilot conducted across several government departments, including the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and agencies handling welfare, pensions and child services. The initiative tested Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant built into Microsoft tools such as Word, Outlook, Teams, Excel, and used Copilot to manage routine tasks like drafting documents, replying to emails, setting up meetings and preparing presentations. According to the final study, 'trial participants saved an average of 26 minutes a day when using M365 Copilot.' The trial was launched as part of a broader push to modernise government operations and explore how new technologies could increase efficiency and reduce bureaucracy. UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle presented the findings at SXSW London, noting that artificial intelligence has the potential to 'help us work smarter, reduce red tape, and make better use of taxpayers' money.'advertisementThe report showed a high level of satisfaction among users, with 'user sentiment overwhelmingly positive, with 82 per cent expressing they would not want to return to their pre-Copilot working conditions.' Additionally, 'over 70 per cent of users agreed that M365 Copilot reduced time spent searching for information, performing mundane tasks, and increased time spent on more strategic activities.'That said, the trial also revealed challenges and limitations. Some users raised concerns over security and data handling, especially when dealing with sensitive or complex material. As noted in the report, 'perceived concerns with security and the handling of sensitive data led to reduced benefits in a minority of cases. Limitations were observed when dealing with complex, nuanced, or data-heavy aspects of work.'Still, the majority of feedback was optimistic. The experiment reported high engagement levels, with '39 per cent of users using it multiple times a day, and a further 43 per cent using it at least multiple times a week.' Satisfaction scores also reflected this enthusiasm, with users rating their overall experience at 7.7 out of 10, and 8.2 out of 10 for recommending the tool to AI assistant was most frequently used within Microsoft Teams, which saw the highest adoption rate of 71 per cent. However, adoption was notably lower for other tools: Excel peaked at 23 per cent and PowerPoint at 24 per cent. Usage of Word and Outlook declined slightly toward the end of the experiment, while Copilot Chat showed a small recovery after a brief trial found that 'results were consistent across grades and professions, with differences observed in how the tool was used and where benefits were realised.' Some employees with conditions like dyslexia and dyspraxia also found the AI tools especially helpful, enabling them to complete work more 'only 17 per cent [of users] did not notice any clear time savings,' more than a third of respondents reported saving over 30 minutes a day. The study concludes that if such results were applied across the wider civil service, the time saved could significantly improve productivity and free up workers for higher-value tasks.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why an Investment Bank Remains Bullish on Microsoft (MSFT)
Investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald remained upbeat on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in a recent note to investors, highlighting what it sees as the tech giant's significant progress in AI. Cantor kept a $512 price target and an Overweight rating on the name. Cantor believes that the tech giant will soon be seen as a leader in agentic AI, based on products within the latter sector that it recently unveiled. For example, the investment bank was pleased by the tech giant's introduction of multiple agents to its M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio products. Meanwhile, Azure, MSFT's cloud-infrastructure unit, is producing AI apps, agents, and management tools, Cantor reported. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s launch of a coding agent and its introduction of new large-language models were also greeted enthusiastically by Cantor. MSFT's AI tools are expected to help developers, the investment bank added. While we acknowledge the potential of MSFT as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MSFT and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock. READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires. Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Microsoft Q3 Earnings & Revenues Beat on Surging Cloud Business
Microsoft MSFT reported third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings of $3.46 per share, which beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 8.13% and increased 17.7% on a year-over-year basis. See the Zacks Earnings Calendar to stay ahead of market-making of $70.06 billion increased 13.3% year over year and beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.46%. At constant currency (cc), revenues grew 15% year over year, showcasing strong demand for cloud and AI offerings. Microsoft stock saw its shares jump 7% in extended trading on accelerating growth in its Azure cloud infrastructure unit. Commercial bookings increased 18% (up 17% in cc) and were significantly ahead of expectations, driven by Azure commitments from OpenAI. Execution was strong across core annuity sales remaining performance obligation increased 33% (up 34% in cc) to $315 billion. Roughly 40% will be recognized in revenues in the next 12 months, up 17% year over year. The remaining portion, recognized beyond the next 12 months, increased 47%. In the reported quarter, the annuity mix was 98%.FX was roughly in line with expectations on total company revenues, segment-level revenues, and operating expense growth. FX decreased COGS growth by only 1 point, 1 point unfavorable to Cloud revenues were $42.4 billion, which was ahead of expectations, and grew 21% (up 22% in cc). Microsoft Cloud's gross margin percentage was 69%, which was in line with expectations, and decreased 3 points year over year, owing to the impact of scaling the AI infrastructure. Microsoft Corporation price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | Microsoft Corporation Quote The Productivity & Business Processes segment, which includes the Office and Dynamics CRM businesses, contributed 42.7% to total revenues. Revenues increased 10.4% (up 13% at cc) on a year-over-year basis to $29.9 billion, which came ahead of expectations, driven by LinkedIn, Microsoft 365 commercial products, and Microsoft 365 consumer.M365 commercial cloud revenues increased 12% (up 15% in cc), in line with expectations. ARPU growth was again driven by E5 and M365 Copilot. With M365 Copilot, MSFT continues to see growth in adoption, expansion and usage. ARPU growth was again driven by E5 and M365 Copilot. Paid M365 commercial seats grew 7% year over year to 430 million, with installed base expansion across all customer segments, though primarily in small and medium business and frontline worker offerings.M365 commercial products revenues increased 5% (up 8% in cc), significantly ahead of expectations, driven by higher-than-expected Office transactional purchasing. M365 consumer cloud revenues rose 10% (up 12% in cc), ahead of expectations, driven by higher-than-expected subscription growth following the price increase in January. Microsoft consumer subscriptions grew 9% to 87.7 revenues increased 7% (up 8% in cc), ahead of expectations, due to better-than-expected performance across all businesses. The Talent Solutions business continues to be impacted by weakness in the hiring subscriptions, LinkedIn Premium saw more than 75% quarter-over-quarter subscriber growth in the Premium Pages offering for SMBs. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions remains the leader in B2B advertising, with two consecutive quarters of accelerated revenue 365 revenues jumped 16% (up 18% in cc), in line with expectations with continued growth across all gross margin dollars increased 10% (up 13% in cc), and gross margin percentage was relatively unchanged year over year despite scaling the company's AI infrastructure. Operating expenses rose 1% (up 2% in cc) and operating income grew 15% (up 18% in cc).The Intelligent Cloud segment, including server and enterprise products and services, contributed 38.2% to total revenues. The segment reported revenues of $26.75 billion and grew 20.8% (up 22% in cc), ahead of expectations, driven by products and cloud services revenues climbed 22% (up 24% in cc). In Azure and other cloud services, revenues grew 33% (up 35% in cc), including 16 points from AI services. Focused execution drove non-AI services results, where the company saw accelerated growth in the enterprise customer segment as well as some improvement in scale motions. In Azure AI services, Microsoft brought capacity online faster than it comes to cloud migrations, Microsoft continues to see customers like Abercrombie & Fitch Co. ANF, Coca-Cola KO and ServiceNow NOW, expanding their footprints on Azure. Microsoft remains the cloud of choice for customers' mission-critical VMWare, SAP and Oracle workloads, with more regional availability than any other the on-premises server business, revenues decreased 6% (down 4% in cc), slightly below expectations, due to renewals with lower in-period revenue recognition from the mix of contracts. The year-over-year decline is reflective of the continued customer shift to cloud and partner services revenues grew 5% (up 6% in cc), which came slightly ahead of expectations due to better-than-expected performance in Enterprise Support gross margin dollars increased 13% (up 14% in cc) and gross margin percentage decreased 4 points year over year, primarily due to scaling the company's AI infrastructure. Operating expenses rose 6% (up 7% in cc) and operating income grew 17% (up 18% in cc).More Personal Computing segment, which primarily comprises Windows, Gaming, Devices and Search businesses, contributed 19.1% to total revenues. Revenues were $13.3 billion, which grew 6% (up 7% in cc) and came ahead of expectations due to better-than-expected results across all OEM and Devices revenues increased 3% year over year, which came ahead of expectations, as tariff uncertainty through the quarter resulted in inventory levels that remained and news advertising revenue ex-TAC increased 21% (up 23% in cc), which came slightly ahead of expectations, driven by usage from a third-party partnership, better-than-expected rate expansion, and volume growth across Edge and Gaming, revenues increased 5% (up 6% in cc). Xbox content and services revenues rose 8% (up 9% in cc), which came ahead of expectations, driven by stronger-than-expected performance in third-party and first-party continues to transform the business and focus on margin expansion, bringing games to more than 500 million monthly active users across devices. The company ended the quarter as the top publisher by pre-orders and pre-installs on both Xbox and the PlayStation Game Pass revenues increased more than 45% year over year. With Xbox Play Anywhere, players can now access more than 1,000 games they can play across console and gross margin dollars increased 9% (up 11% in cc). Gross margin percentage increased 2 points year over year, driven by strong execution on margin improvement in Gaming and expenses increased 1%. Operating income increased 21% (up 23% in cc), driven by continued prioritization of higher margin opportunities. Microsoft shared impressive growth across the company's AI portfolio. The Azure AI Foundry application and agent development hub has now been adopted by developers at more than 70,000 enterprises and digital-native companies. Token processing reached unprecedented levels, with Microsoft processing more than 100 trillion tokens this quarter, a fivefold increase year over year, including a record 50 trillion tokens in March four months after launch, Microsoft's Azure AI Agent Service has been utilized by more than 10,000 organizations to build, deploy, and scale agents. The company's Phi small language models have gained significant traction, with 38 million downloads to date. In the development space, GitHub Copilot's code review agent has handled more than eight million requests, while GitHub Copilot itself has surpassed 15 million users, representing more than fourfold growth year over 365 Copilot continues to expand its global footprint with hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide and usage is increasing threefold compared to the previous year. The company noted that Copilot's "overall deal size continues to grow," with the quarter seeing "a record number of customers returning to buy more seats." The adoption of Copilot Studio has been particularly strong, with more than 230,000 organizations, including 90% of the Fortune 500, implementing the agent creation has seen remarkable growth, with customers developing more than one million custom agents across SharePoint and Copilot Studio this quarter, more than double the previous quarter. In healthcare, Dragon Copilot has made significant strides, helping document nearly 9.5 million physician-patient encounters at healthcare providers, representing growth of more than 50% quarter over quarter. Microsoft reported significant growth across its data products portfolio during the third quarter of fiscal 2025. PostgreSQL usage continued its momentum for the third consecutive quarter, now being utilized by nearly 605 of Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft Fabric has shown remarkable expansion with more than 21,000 paid customers, representing an 80% increase year over company highlighted Real-Time Intelligence as Fabric's fastest-growing workload, with 40% of customers adopting it within just five months of general availability. Integration across Fabric's ecosystem is strong, with more than 50% of customers using three or more workloads. Data stored in Microsoft's multi-cloud data lake, OneLake, has experienced exponential growth, increasing more than sixfold over the past tools continue to show strong adoption, with Visual Studio and VS Code reaching more than 50 million monthly active users. Power Platform has expanded its user base to 56 million monthly active users, a 27 percent increase year over year. Windows 11 commercial deployments have surged nearly 75 percent year over year as Microsoft continues to prepare for Windows 10's end of support in the security segment, Microsoft now serves 1.4 million security customers, with more than 900,000 of these customers utilizing four or more workloads, representing a 21% year-over-year increase. The company's Entra identity offering now serves more than 900 million monthly active users. Microsoft also noted growth in the use of Databricks and Snowflake on Azure, though specific figures were not toward future technologies, Microsoft is putting its quantum stack on machines from partners and making real progress on a path to a utility-scale quantum computer with the introduction of Majorana 1, the company's quantum chip unveiled in February. Gross profit increased 11.1% year over year to $48.14 billion. The gross margin contracted 140 basis points (bps) to 68.7% on a year-over-year basis, down 1 point year over year, due to the impact of scaling AI expenses rose 2.4% year over year to $16.14 billion, lower than expected, and operating margins increased 1 point year over year to 46%. At a total company level, headcount at the end of March was 2% higher than a year ago and was down slightly compared to last income was $32 billion and increased 16% (up 19% in cc). The operating margin expanded 110 bps to 45.7% on a year-over-year & Business Process operating income rose 14.8% to $17.37 billion. Intelligent Cloud operating income increased 16.6% to $11.09 billion. More Personal Computing's operating income increased 20.6% to $3.52 billion. As of March 31, 2025, Microsoft had total cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments balance of $79.61 billion compared with $71.55 billion as of Dec. 31, of March 31, 2025, long-term debt (including the current portion) was $39.88 billion compared with $44.66 billion as of Dec. 31, flow from operations was $37 billion, up 16%, driven by strong cloud billings and collections, partially offset by higher tax payments. Free cash flow was $20.3 returned $9.7 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Microsoft expects the cost of revenues between $23.6 billion and $23.8 billion and operating expenses to grow in the $18-$18.1 billion range. Other income and expenses are expected to be roughly $(1.2) company expects revenue growth in the productivity and business processes segment between $32.05 billion and $32.35 billion. MSFT expects Office 365 Commercial revenue growth to be roughly 14% at cc. Office Commercial products revenues are expected to grow in mid-single Office Consumer products and cloud services, Microsoft expects revenue growth in mid-teens. For LinkedIn, the company expects revenue growth in high-single digits. In Dynamics, MSFT expects revenue growth in the mid-to-high teens Intelligent Cloud, Microsoft anticipates revenues between $28.75 billion and $29.05 billion. In Azure, MSFT expects revenue growth at cc between 34% and 35%. In Enterprise Services, revenues are expected to grow in mid-to-high single digits. The company expects Server product revenues to decline in mid-single More Personal Computing, the company projects revenues between $12.35 billion and $12.85 billion. It expects Windows OEM revenues to decline in mid-to-high single Gaming, this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company expects revenues to grow in mid-single digits. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks expects Xbox content and services revenues to grow in high-single digits. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) : Free Stock Analysis Report CocaCola Company (The) (KO) : Free Stock Analysis Report Abercrombie & Fitch Company (ANF) : Free Stock Analysis Report ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Sign in to access your portfolio
Business Insider
01-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Microsoft sees Productivity/Business Process segment revenue $32.05B-$32.35B
M365 Commercial Cloud revenue growth should be 14%. Expect continued ARPU growth through E5 and M365 Copilot. Protect Your Portfolio Against Market Uncertainty Discover companies with rock-solid fundamentals in TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter. Receive undervalued stocks, resilient to market uncertainty, delivered straight to your inbox. Published first on TheFly – the ultimate source for real-time, market-moving breaking financial news. Try Now>>
Mid East Info
14-03-2025
- Business
- Mid East Info
e& UAE deploys M365 Copilot at scale to drive AI-powered workplace transformation - Middle East Business News and Information
e& UAE, the flagship telecommunications arm of e&, is expanding its long-standing partnership with Microsoft through the large-scale deployment of M365 Copilot across its operations. This collaboration is set to accelerate e& UAE's ongoing digital transformation, enhancing workplace productivity, streamlining workflows, and advancing AI-driven innovation. As the UAE continues to execute its vision of becoming a global leader in AI, e& UAE is leveraging M365 Copilot's extensibility to develop Agentic AI solutions. These solutions infuse AI-driven automation and intelligent decision-making across various business functions. By integrating M365 Copilot at scale, e& UAE is empowering its employees to focus on high-value innovation rather than routine tasks. e& UAE is at the forefront of workplace transformation, advancing the adoption of artificial intelligence across various operational domains. The organization has empowered hundreds of its developers to utilize GitHub Copilot for coding, testing, and documentation tasks, thereby streamlining the software development lifecycle significantly. Furthermore, e& UAE is enhancing its internal applications through the integration of Azure OpenAI, which bolsters our AI-driven capabilities and underscores our dedication to leading the development of innovative AI solution Masood M. Sharif Mahmood, CEO, e& UAE, said: 'AI is at the core of our transformation at e& UAE as we evolve into a leading AI-powered telco. Our partnership with Microsoft is a key driver of this journey. The deployment of M365 Copilot at this scale will help us build an AI-powered workplace operations, empower our workforce with the essential tools necessary to generate significant impact by offering intelligent solutions and delivering customer experiences that not only anticipate client needs but also personalize each interaction, thereby establishing new benchmarks within the industry M365 Copilot is an enterprise-ready AI tool, designed to enhance productivity, optimise workflows, and enable employees to focus on strategic initiatives. By automating routine tasks and streamlining complex processes, the solution allows employees to dedicate more time to creativity, problem-solving, and customer-centric innovation. Naim Yazbeck, General Manager of Microsoft UAE, said: 'Our partnership with e& UAE marks a significant milestone in our journey towards AI-driven innovation. The deployment of M365 Copilot at scale is a testament to our shared vision of transforming workplace productivity and enhancing customer experiences. By leveraging the advanced capabilities of Copilot, e& UAE is not only streamlining workflows but also empowering their employees to focus on high-value tasks and drive meaningful innovation. This collaboration underscores the immense potential of AI in revolutionizing business operations and setting new industry benchmarks.' The deployment of M365 Copilot will support e& UAE's strategic vision of fostering an AI-driven culture, ensuring employees are equipped with cutting-edge AI tools and expertise. About e& UAE: e& UAE embodies the telecom arm of e& in the UAE, with a mission to maximise stakeholder value, deliver an unparalleled customer experience and optimise business performance for sustainable growth and success. Leveraging the latest world-class technologies, e& UAE will grow core and digital services, enriching consumer value propositions with digital services catering to new consumer lifestyles and emerging demands beyond core telecom services, including health, insurance and gaming. e& UAE will continue to act as a trusted partner to enterprises in meeting their connectivity needs and beyond. Bolstering its leadership position as a digital telco that champions customers in a hyper-connected digital world, e& UAE will pivot the new sustainable demand into future spaces such as private networks, autonomous vehicles, and AI.
