Microsoft's grand vision of making artificial intelligence the cornerstone of its business strategy is encountering hurdles. The enthusiasm for AI adoption among enterprise clients and end-users has not lived up to the company's expectations. This has cast a shadow over the growth aspirations for its Azure cloud business and dampened the prospects of its flagship AI products, such as Copilot. Several sales teams within Azure have fallen short of the lofty growth targets set for Foundry, Microsoft's AI model and agent-building platform tailored for enterprises. This underperformance has led Microsoft to temper its growth forecasts for the upcoming fiscal year—a notable departure from the company's usual practice of annually escalating its targets.
