Microsoft lowers AI software sales quota, stock price drops nearly 3%, marking the largest decline in half a month

Microsoft has lowered the sales targets for some AI software due to the slower-than-expected acceptance of new artificial intelligence products by enterprise customers.

On December 3rd, according to media reports, due to the sales team failing to meet targets for the fiscal year ending in June this year, Microsoft's Azure cloud division has reduced sales quotas for specific AI products. Sources indicate that such reductions in product-specific quotas are rare at Microsoft, reflecting the company's adjustment of strategies based on actual market acceptance to address clients' cautious attitudes towards increasing AI budgets.

A sales department within Microsoft Azure had previously requested sales personnel to increase customer spending on a product called Foundry by 50% in the last fiscal year, but ultimately, less than one-fifth of the sales personnel met the target. As a result, Microsoft lowered the growth target for this product to around 25% for the current fiscal year in July.

In response to this news, Microsoft's stock price fell by as much as 2.9%, marking the largest decline since November 18. Subsequently, according to media reports, Microsoft stated in an email declaration that the company did not lower the sales quotas for its salespeople, and the decline narrowed to 1.7%.

Industry analysis points out that this adjustment reveals the common challenges enterprises face when deploying advanced AI tools: on one hand, the actual cost savings brought by technology are difficult to quantify clearly; on the other hand, in low-tolerance areas such as finance and cybersecurity, the reliability and commercial value of AI tools still require more time for validation. Although Microsoft's cloud infrastructure business continues to grow due to the training demands of large models like OpenAI, actual progress in driving traditional enterprises to procure more complex automation software has not met the previously set optimistic expectations.

Microsoft is not the only one facing similar challenges. OpenAI recently significantly lowered its revenue forecast related to "AI agents" for the next five years by $26 billion, while companies like Salesforce are attracting customers through significant discount strategies. This indicates that despite the ongoing technological enthusiasm for generative AI, transitioning from conceptual demonstrations to large-scale commercial applications still faces multiple real-world obstacles.

Enterprise Customers Encounter Implementation Difficulties

The case of private equity firm Carlyle highlights the real challenges enterprises face when adopting AI tools. The company began using Microsoft's Copilot Studio last year, which allows businesses to develop AI applications by writing code to automate tasks such as organizing meeting minutes and generating Excel financial models.

However, after several months of use, Carlyle provided feedback to Microsoft that the tool struggled to reliably extract data from other business systems like Salesforce, which is crucial for some of its automated processes. According to insiders, this fall, Carlyle has cut spending on the related tools. This adjustment is part of the company's overall AI spending optimization and tool integration plan

Industry Generally Lowers Expectations

Microsoft is not the only company adjusting its AI agent revenue expectations. For example, OpenAI recently significantly lowered its AI agent-related revenue forecast for the next five years by $26 billion. The company plans to fill this gap by increasing ChatGPT subscription revenue and launching new products that may include advertising. In fact, its CEO Sam Altman stated this Monday that the company will pause the advancement of agent services in areas such as advertising and healthcare to focus on resolving existing issues with ChatGPT.

For enterprise software companies like Salesforce, the challenges of increasing AI agent revenue are even more pronounced, as they lack the large cloud infrastructure business that supports Microsoft.

To this end, Salesforce and companies like ServiceNow are offering significant discounts to customers trialing their AI agent products, which are designed to automate workflows such as IT ticket processing or new employee onboarding. Meanwhile, other tech companies, including AWS and Anthropic, are investing resources to help customers correctly configure and deploy AI applications by providing similar consulting services