Tag: Microsoft Copilot

Posted on

Microsoft Financial Results: FY25 Q2


Microsoft have announced their Q2 results for FY25 and, not surprisingly at all, they’ve earned a LOT of money and are talking a lot about AI!

Overall results

Revenue was up 125 to $69.6 billion and Net Income was up 10% to $24.1 billion. The over-arching “Microsoft Cloud” segment increased 21% to $40.9 billion while the AI business was approx. $3.25 billion as it had an annual run rate of $13 billion, which is 175% up year on year.

Satya Nadella sad:

“We are innovating across our tech stack and helping customers unlock the full ROI of AI to capture the massive opportunity ahead,”

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $24.9 billion, up 14%

This was driven by a 16% increase in M365 Commercial cloud revenue and 19% revenue growth for Dynamics 365.

Microsoft saw “better-than-expected performance in E5 and M365 Copilot, both of which drove Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $25.5 billion, up 19%

31% growth in Azure (and other cloud services)

Earnings Call

  • There were 54 mentions of AI throughout the call.
  • Over 19.000 paying customers for Microsoft Fabric.
  • 30 million+ monthly active users (MAU) for Power BI, which is 40% up year on year.
  • 200,000 MAU for Azure AI Foundry.
  • Over 400,000 custom agents created with Copilot Studio across 160,000 orgs in the last 3 months.
  • Continued growth in the number of $100 million+ contracts for Azure and M365.

More changes to the partner channel?

CFO Amy Hood stated:

“Growth in our non-AI services was slightly lower than expected due to go-to-market execution challenges, particularly with our customers that we primarily reach through our scale motions, as we balance driving near-term non-AI consumption with AI growth.”

She described the “scale motion” as “customers we reach through partners and through more indirect methods of selling” and alluded to changes around where investments, marketing spend, and internal resources would be positioned to help drive sales through the partner channel.

Nadella also said “How do you really tweak the incentives go to market? At a time of platform shifts, you want to make sure you lean into even the new design wins, and you just don’t keep doing the stuff that you did in the previous generation.“

This could be partly behind Microsoft’s increasing drive to take more customers direct, that it gives them more control over what’s happening to drive organisations towards new platforms and products.

Check it out here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q2/press-release-webcast

Posted on

Microsoft Financial Results: Q3 FY24


Let’s take a look at Microsoft’s financial results for Q3 FY24 (Jan – Mar 24) and, in a not surprising move at all – they’re pretty good!

Headline Numbers

Revenue = $61.9 billion (17% increase)

Net income = $21.9 billion (20% increase)

Within that, “Microsoft Cloud” was $35.1 billion, an increase of 23% year on year.

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $19.6 billion (up 12%)

  • Office 365 Commercial revenue increased 15%
    • Commercial seats grew 8% driven by SMB and Frontline SKUs again
  • LinkedIn increase 10%
  • Dynamics 365 grew 19%

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $26.7 billion (up 21%)

Azure grew 31% – yet again the growth percentage increases for another quarter. Interestingly, server licenses were up 6% due to hybrid and BYOL licensing.

Earnings Call Highlights

  • “Copilot” features 47 times in the transcript
  • Office 365 ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) grew thanks to E5 and Copilot
  • Enterprise Mobility & Security (EMS) now has 274 million seats, up 10%
  • Azure Arc now has 33,000 customers
  • The average size and length of Azure deals has increased
  • The number of 100 million dollar-plus Azure deals increased over 80% year-over-year (YoY) while the number of 10 million dollar-plus deals more than doubled
  • Over 11,000 customers for Microsoft Fabric <– How many of those are simply Power BI Premium users who have moved over early?
  • 30,000 organisations using Copilot for Studio to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and/or make their own
  • PowerApps users are now at 25 million per month, a 40% increase YoY

Posted on

Copilot for Microsoft 365 licensing


Photo by Kelly on Pexels.com

We’re 15 days into 2024 and Microsoft have dropped some big AI news already. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now literally Generally Available!

Copilot for Microsoft 365

It’s now available on CSP for businesses with M365 Business Std and Business Premium licenses. $30 each and between 1 – 299 quantity can be purchased.

The 300 license minimum has been removed for commercial plans.

Furthermore, it can now be added to Office 365 E3 and E5. Great that it is available to a wider range of organisations without additional licenses being needed…but surely it needs a name change now? 🤔

Copilot Pro

This new product gives 1 AI that runs across a user’s device and gives access to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on PC, Mac and iPad for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

Note there is no access to Copilot in Teams.

Priced at $20 per user per month.

The Microsoft announcement is here: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/01/15/bringing-the-full-power-of-copilot-to-more-people-and-businesses/#_edn1

Posted on

Microsoft Product Terms for October 2023


Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

The Office 365 “no Teams” EEA SKUs have been added

Azure AD rebranded to Microsoft Entra ID

Universal Print per user added

Microsoft Defender for IoT – EIoT Device License – add-on added

Bit of Viva name tweaking, we now have:
   Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities
   Microsoft Viva Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback

The Copilot Copyright Commitment is added

New Copilot/Generative AI relation terms including:

“Customer may not…try to gain unauthorized access to or disrupt any service, device, data, account or network, including by intentionally evading or disrupting restrictions in Metaprompts”

Posted on

More Microsoft Copilot news – September 2023


Photo by APEX.GRAPHICS on Pexels.com

Microsoft have announced a new offering, Microsoft Copilot.

No, I haven’t been under a rock for the last 12 months…I know there are already a bunch of Copilots but it looks like Microsoft have, in their infinite wisdom, decided to bundle some of the Copilots (but not all of them) together into 1 thing called Copilot 🙄

The entity known as “Microsoft Copilot” will include (if that is the right word?):

  • Windows 11
  • Microsoft 365
  • Edge
  • Bing

Microsoft say:

“Copilot will begin to roll out in its early form as part of our free update to Windows 11, starting Sept. 26 — and across Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365 Copilot this fall.”

With regards to the M365 piece, I think it means that “Copilot” will be able to interact with M365 Copilot – rather than include its capabilities…but it’s not really clear.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Release date

Microsoft have announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot General Availability for Enterprise customers is November 1, 2023. There is a 300 user minimum purchase for Copilot too – meaning a $9,000 per month spend at least. While it’s a surprise to see this minimum, it’s not a huge outlay for most Enterprise Agreement customers really.

It’s been noted that 300 is the maximum for the Business plans so, despite announcing a Copilot add for Business SKUs, this effectively precludes the majority of SMBs. In my opinion, Microsoft will reduce/remove the minimum at the point they make Copilot available on other agreements.

Why is there a minimum? That’s a great question and one that we don’t have a definite answer for. It seems most likely that Copilot needs a certain amount of data (and perhaps connections )to really work its magic – although, saying that, all the Copilot examples I’ve seen wouldn’t seem to require that. They’ve all focused on individual areas – add a column to this table, calculate the average sales for next year, makes all slides the same font etc. and that wouldn’t need aggregated internal training data.

Some people suggest it’s to set a minimum revenue threshold but I’m not sure about that either tbh.

New feature

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat works across all your data including, but not limited to:

  • Emails
  • Meetings
  • Chats
  • Documents
  • Web

and will work as an assistant that understands “you, your job, your priorities and your organization“.

Big thanks to Jack Rowbotham, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager, for sharing this info on LinkedIn 😊

See my other posts on Microsoft 365 CoPilot here:

Licensing details

Pricing

Adoption Guide

Posted on

Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing


Photo by Kelly on Pexels.com

Microsoft’s latest AI product Copilot, which promises to be a real game changer when it comes to applying Generative AI to business, now has pricing available.

It will cost $30 per user per month and, as we saw recently, will be an add-on license to Microsoft 365 E3/E5/Business Std/Business Premium.

That’s higher than I was expecting; I thought they’d go lower to ensure as many people as possible got on-board. I know there stand to be some really great time savings and productivity increases but an additional $360,000 per year for an organisation licensing 1,000 users seems quite steep.

Of course, many organisations won’t pay that price in reality with volume discounts on EA, negotiated discounts etc. but it will still represent a large investment for many.

Bing Enterprise Chat

This has also been announced – a way to give employees a more powerful way of searching without risking data leakage. Microsoft state:

“Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access – which means no one can view your data. And, your data is not used to train the models.”

This is included in Microsoft 365 E3/E5/Business Std/Business Premium free of charge and you can access Bing Chat Enterprise using your work account wherever Bing Chat is supported — Bing.com/chat and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. It will eventually be available as a standalone offering for $5 per user per month.

See the announcement from Microsoft here.

For more news and updates, sign up to my free monthly newsletter here.

Posted on

Microsoft Copilot licensing details


Microsoft Copilot licensing details are here!

While we’re still awaiting the full release, which could be July 1st or perhaps during Microsoft Inspire later that month, we do have more information available.

Eligible base licenses are:

Microsoft 365 E3
Microsoft 365 E5
Microsoft 365 Business Standard
Microsoft 365 Business Premium

And users need to have an Azure AD account too. This is a clear indication that Copilot will be an extra add-on license.

Furthermore, their M365 Apps must be on “Current Channel” or the “Monthly Enterprise Channel” to access Co-pilot.

I haven’t seen any indication of pricing yet but I’m thinking perhaps £10 for E3 and £5 for E5? With some promos at first of course.

*Update* It turns out I was way off base! Microsoft have confirmed the price is $30 per user per month. More info and examples here.

See the MS post here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-copilot/how-to-prepare-for-microsoft-365-copilot/ba-p/3851566

Website Powered by WordPress.com.