Microsoft gave extra indicators on Thursday that its hefty investments in synthetic intelligence had been starting to bear fruit, because it reported a 17 % bounce in income and a 20 % enhance in revenue for the primary three months of the 12 months.

Income was $61.9 billion, up from $52.9 billion a 12 months earlier. Revenue hit $21.9 billion, up from $18.3 billion. The outcomes beat Wall Avenue’s expectations.

A 12 months after Microsoft started its push to place A.I. into the whole lot it does, the corporate stated gross sales of its flagship cloud computing product, Azure, had grown 31 %. That included seven proportion factors from its generative A.I. companies, that are primarily promoting entry to expertise developed by its associate, OpenAI.

In latest quarters, Microsoft’s A.I. push has helped it achieve market share from Amazon, the main cloud companies supplier. In January, the corporate stated 53,000 clients had been utilizing its cloud A.I. companies, with a 3rd of them new to Azure.

By means of its companies, Microsoft is “orchestrating a brand new period of A.I. transformation, driving higher enterprise outcomes throughout each position and trade,” Satya Nadella, the chief government, stated in a press release.

This was the primary full quarter when industrial clients might get a model of Microsoft’s productiveness suite with A.I. instruments, like transcribing digital conferences in Groups or summarizing paperwork in Phrase. Although the corporate didn’t say what number of A.I. subscriptions — which value $30 a month — it had bought, industrial subscriptions grew 15 %.

(The New York Occasions sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of stories content material associated to their A.I. techniques.)

Microsoft has dedicated $13 billion to its partnership with OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, and it has been constructing new knowledge facilities across the globe to satisfy what it anticipates shall be extra A.I. demand. The corporate spent $14 billion on capital bills and leases within the first three months of the 12 months, up from $11.5 billion within the earlier quarter.

Gaming, Microsoft’s most essential client product, grew 51 % to $5.5 billion, with an enormous enhance from its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the maker of Name of Responsibility and different blockbuster video games, in October.