Microsoft Lowers Sales Staff’s Growth Targets For Newer AI Software

Executives at Microsoft and other enterprise software firms heralded 2025 as the year artificial intelligence would be capable of automating tasks that involve multiple steps, such as generating dashboards based on company sales data. But as the year comes to a close, Microsoft has lowered expectations for how quickly it can get customers to spend money on these newer products, known as agents.

Multiple Microsoft divisions, for instance, have lowered how much salespeople are supposed to grow their sales of certain AI products after many of them missed sales-growth goals in the fiscal year that ended in June, according to two salespeople in Microsoft’s Azure cloud unit. It’s rare for Microsoft to lower such quotas for specific products, the people said.