on Tuesday told employees it was promoting four sales executives, months after the software company made sales leader Judson Althoff CEO of its commercial business.
Investors have been wondering how much Microsoft and other longstanding software companies can grow as corporate workers build new applications using generative artificial intelligence models. Microsoft shares have slipped 15% so far this year, trailing all other Magnificent Seven technology stocks.
Last week Microsoft issued Azure cloud growth that came in below some projections. Executives said they want to allocate more computing resources to research and development teams and to its AI products such as the Microsoft 365 Copilot productivity software add-on and the GitHub Copilot coding assistant, while still meeting Azure client demand.
“Judson expanded the remits of his leadership team to free up more time to focus on Microsoft’s commercial product strategy and to keep the feedback loop between customers and product decisions as small as possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “This feedback loop is critical right now because AI is being adopted at extraordinary speed, and our customers expect these capabilities to come to life in their business faster than ever before.”
