#Gate广场五月交易分享 Microsoft’s current “burst point” is not driven by a single product, but rather by the moment when its AI strategy moves into a key inflection point of commercialization acceleration and large-scale monetization. This burst point is shaped jointly by strong revenue growth, a clear shift in its business model, and enormous market potential, while also being accompanied by challenges brought by high investments.

🚀 Core ignition point: AI business enters explosive growth

According to Microsoft’s fiscal third-quarter report for 2026 (as of March 31, 2026), the growth momentum of its AI business is extremely strong, becoming the core engine driving the company’s development.

Revenue surge: The annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of the AI business has already surpassed $37 billion, up 123% year over year.

Copilot accelerates adoption: As the flagship product of its AI strategy, Microsoft 365 Copilot’s paid seats have exceeded 20 million. In just this recently passed quarter, the growth rate of new seats reached 250%, the fastest since the product’s launch, and the depth of users’ weekly usage has already matched Outlook.

Strong cloud business support: The explosion in AI demand directly boosted strong growth in Azure cloud services. In this quarter, Azure revenue grew 40% year over year, exceeding market expectations.

🔄 Business model transformation: from “selling seats” to “selling usage”

Microsoft is shifting its AI business model from a simple “seat subscription” to a more flexible hybrid model of “seats + usage-based consumption.”

Significance: This change means Microsoft’s revenue will no longer depend only on growth in the number of users, but will instead be linked to the intensity and value of users’ actual AI usage. This is expected to open a larger revenue ceiling and enable a shift from being driven by “user numbers” to being driven by “usage intensity.”

Practice: GitHub Copilot was the first to switch to this usage- and value-based pricing model.

📈 Future growth potential: the starting point for enterprise AI deployment

Microsoft’s burst point is also reflected in its accurate positioning of future technology trends.

Platform shift: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defines the current period as a technological turning point, and believes that “intelligent agents (Agent)” will become the dominant workload, changing the way the entire economy creates value.

Market position: As enterprise customers move from the AI experimentation stage to large-scale deployment, Microsoft—backed by deep integrations across its full range of products such as Azure cloud, Microsoft 365, and GitHub—has become a core platform for enterprise AI adoption. Its commercial remaining performance obligations (RPO) have reached $627 billion, up 99% year over year, demonstrating customers’ long-term commitment to future spending. $MSFTON