The Tribune

By CHRIS ILLING

CCO @ Activtrades Corp

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) has been the new hype on Wall Street over the past six months, and investors are looking at start-ups and already-established companies to benefit from it.

Four months ago, Microsoft proudly announced that Microsoft 365 would use AI to transform the office software into “the most powerful productivity tool in the world”. This is supposed to be made possible, among other things, by the technology behind ChatGPT-4, in whose developer, OpenAI, the group has invested several billion dollars. Now the investor is learning how the company wants to monetise its investment. And Wall Street likes it.

Microsoft announced prices for the use of its AI co-pilot for the first time at an event for partner companies on Tuesday last week. Corporate customers have to pay $30 per user, per month for the new tools. After paying this fee, the co-pilot should support users in creating documents, e-mails, presentations or tables in programs such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Teams, Outlook and others. The interaction with AI should take place in natural language. For example, the system could be instructed: »Inform my team about our new product strategy«, whereupon the software would generate a corresponding status update, including accompanying data and information based on meetings, e-mails and chats. Likewise, the office co-pilot can be instructed to reformulate letters in Word for a specific purpose, to analyse Excel spreadsheets or to automatically create PowerPoint presentations based on various documents. A work assignment such as this would be particularly useful after the employee’s annual holiday: “Create a summary of the e-mails I missed during my vacation and mark all important messages”.

In addition to cloud services, the Microsoft 365 office software is one of the Windows group’s big money machines. For the 2023 third quarter, which ended in March according to Microsoft’s calendar, the company reported a 13 percent increase in sales for its versions of the software alone. Overall, the “Productivity and business processes” segment, to which the Office products belong, achieved sales of $17.5bn in Microsoft’s third quarter.

The stock market seems to be counting on the fact that the lure of these new opportunities will prompt many companies to conclude corresponding contracts. Microsoft’s share price rose during the last six months by approximately 43 percent, and hovers near record highs around $347.

But the competitors are watching. Apple is not being idle over artificial intelligence trends. The iPhone company is working on software that is intended to compete with ChatGPT, and internal engineers already call it AppleGPT.

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, last emphasised in May that the company sees great potential in software with AI but wants to use it with care. The group uses functions with machine learning and artificial intelligence, for example, to improve photos, auto-correct when writing or to recognise car accidents and falls. Apple also pioneered voice assistants with the Siri software more than a decade ago. Investors are also hopeful, and Apple’s share price rose by approximately 37 percent during the last six months to around $194.