Microsoft has just released its annual financial report for its 2023 fiscal year As part of that report, its CEO Satya Nadella has written and published his annual letter to the company"s shareholders. As expected, Nadella is continuing to push Microsoft"s big bet with generative AI, which he feels "will fundamentally transform productivity for every individual, organization, and industry on earth."
In his letter, Nadella stated:
This next generation of AI will reshape every software category and every business, including our own. Forty-eight years after its founding, Microsoft remains a consequential company because time and time again—from PC/Server, to Web/Internet, to Cloud/Mobile—we have adapted to technological paradigm shifts. Today, we are doing so once again, as we lead this new era.
In his lengthy letter, Nadella offers some examples of how Microsoft"s AI products are already helping companies around the world. He cites the Latin American online marketplace company Mercado Libre which is using GitHub Copilot to help reduce the time its developers take to write code. He also mentions how the car maker Mercedes-Benz is testing the use of ChatGPT, powered by Microsoft"s Azure OpenAI Service, so its in-car assistant is improved.
Nadella says that the combination of natural language and a "new reasoning engine" have helped to launch this new AI era at Microsoft. He added:
Together, these two breakthroughs will unlock massive new opportunity. And, in fact, just last month we announced our vision for Copilot, an everyday AI companion. We are building Copilot into all our most used products and experiences and allowing people to summon its power as a standalone app as well. Just like you boot up an OS to access applications or use a browser to visit websites today, our belief is that you will invoke a Copilot to do all those activities and more: to shop, to code, to analyze, to learn, to create.
The letter goes over the new products and services that Microsoft has introduced over the past year in its various departments. Of course, he also mentions, almost in passing, the recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft for nearly $69 billion, which is by far the biggest purchase in the company"s history.
One big thing Nadella failed to mention in his annual report is Microsoft"s decision to lay off 10,000 of its employees in January 2023. Those layoffs are continuing at the company, as its LinkedIn subsidiary recently announced it would let go of 668 additional workers.