Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas within the fiscal yr ending in June, in accordance with a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the corporate missed a variety of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings.
AI agents are specialized implementations of AI language models designed to perform multistep tasks autonomously quite than simply responding to single prompts. So-called “agentic” features have been central to Microsoft’s 2025 sales pitch: At its Construct conference in May, the corporate declared that it has entered “the era of AI agents.”
The corporate has promised customers that agents could automate complex tasks, equivalent to generating dashboards from sales data or writing customer reports. At its Ignite conference in November, Microsoft announced latest features like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, together with tools for constructing and deploying agents through Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. But because the yr draws to a detailed, that promise has proven harder to deliver than the corporate expected.
In response to The Information, one US Azure sales unit set quotas for salespeople to extend customer spending on a product called Foundry, which helps customers develop AI applications, by 50 percent. Lower than a fifth of salespeople in that unit met their Foundry sales growth targets. In July, Microsoft lowered those targets to roughly 25 percent growth for the present fiscal yr. In one other US Azure unit, most salespeople failed to satisfy an earlier quota to double Foundry sales, and Microsoft cut their quotas to 50 percent for the present fiscal yr.
