Microsoft Reports: REDMOND in Washington. (AP) (AP)– Microsoft announced on Tuesday an increase of 9% in its profit in the January-March quarter due to an increase in cloud computing helped to boost its plans to increase its use of artificial intelligence.
The company reported a profit for the quarter of $18.3 billion that’s $2.45 per share. This beat Wall Street expectations for earnings of $2.24 per share.
The software company posted earnings of $52.9 billion during of its third quarter which was up by 7% over the same time last year. The analysts polled by FactSet were expecting Microsoft to earn $51.02 billion in the quarter.
The quarter saw an aggressive effort by Microsoft to make the most of its investments in artificial intelligence as well as its close collaboration with the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI in February, with the launch of a brand new AI chatbot function on Bing, its own search engine. Bing.
Microsoft is adding similar AI tools into cloud computing as well as software it offers to large businesses and other organizations, but it’s unclear how much the AI tools play an impact on overall sales.
Microsoft’s personal computing division focused around the Windows software, is widely anticipated to continue the slowdown that began this year because of uncertainty in the economy and an increase in demand. The quarter-end sales of this segment fell 9.9% up to $13.3 billion, Microsoft announced on Tuesday.
The reason for that drop was a rise of 16% in the cloud-based business segment to $22.1 billion in the quarter. The revenue also increased 11 percent in the quarter to $17.5 billion from Microsoft’s productivity software division that is centered around Microsoft’s Office range of office applications including email.
