Microsoft lowered sales growth targets for its artificial intelligence agent products after many sellers missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to report Environment from Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft and comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales targets for its artificial intelligence offerings.
AI agents are specialized implementations of AI language models designed to autonomously perform multi-step tasks rather than simply respond to individual requests. The so-called “agent” functions were implemented. central to Microsoft's advertising plan for 2025: at the May Build conference the company stated that he had entered the “era of AI agents.”
The company promised customers that agents would be able to automate complex tasks, such as creating dashboards based on sales data or writing reports for clients. At its Ignite conference in November, Microsoft announced new features such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and tools for creating and deploying agents using Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. But as the year draws to a close, delivering on that promise has proven more difficult than the company expected.
According to The Information, one of Azure's U.S. sales divisions has set quotas for sellers to increase customer spending on a product called Foundrywhich helps clients develop artificial intelligence applications, by 50 percent. Less than a fifth of the division's salespeople met their Foundry sales growth goals. In July, Microsoft lowered those goals to about 25 percent growth for the current fiscal year. Elsewhere in Azure's U.S. division, most sellers failed to meet a previously set quota of doubling Foundry's sales, and Microsoft cut its quotas to 50 percent for the current fiscal year.
