According to a new report from The Information, Microsoft has quietly lowered sales quotas for its advanced AI agent software after realizing that corporate customers are not buying into the technology as quickly as predicted.
- Slash in Quotas: Following missed targets in the fiscal year ending in June, Microsoft reduced growth expectations for some Azure sales teams significantly—cutting targets from 50% growth down to roughly 25%, and in other cases from 100% down to 50%.
- Customer Resistance: Businesses are hesitating to commit to these expensive tools because they are struggling to measure return on investment (ROI) and are encountering difficulties integrating the AI with external data sources reliably.
- Industry-Wide Reality Check: This cooling trend extends beyond Microsoft; competitor OpenAI has also lowered its revenue projections for AI agents by $26 billion over the next five years.
Despite these hurdles, Microsoft’s overall cloud business remains strong, largely driven by infrastructure rentals to AI developers like OpenAI.
