Microsoft Shares Surge to Record High with Unveiling of AI Subscription Service

Key Insights

• Microsoft closed at a record high after revealing prices for a subscription to AI services in office programs.
• The company announced the price of a Microsoft Copilot subscription that will bring AI to popular Office products. 

Microsoft stock rose to an all-time high on Tuesday, July 18, after the company announced pricing for Microsoft Copilot, which adds artificial intelligence (AI) to Microsoft 365 and popular office programs like Word, Excel, and Teams, according to CNBC.

Investor interest in the opportunities to increase revenue through AI technologies leads to an increase in the company’s market value for the second time in a year.

Microsoft shares jumped 4%

Shares of the IT giant jumped 3.98% to close at a record high of $359.49. Post-market, they continued to rise to $360.77.

The previous closing record was recorded on June 15 – securities closed at $348.1 after company executives predicted annual income from artificial intelligence (AI) of $10 billion, wrote CNBC.

Analysts at JPMorgan raised their target price for Microsoft shares from $315 per share to $350 by mid-June, based on the prospects for growth in AI cloud software (software) revenue. Since the beginning of 2023, the share price has increased by about 50%.

Microsoft is pouring money into generative AI, mostly through a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Microsoft has implemented OpenAI tools in its Bing search engine and in the Windows operating system.

Microsoft’s Copilot subscription service cost $30

A Microsoft Copilot subscription adds artificial intelligence (AI) to the company’s popular office products such as Word, Excel, and Teams.

It will cost an additional $30 per month. It can increase the monthly cost for corporate customers by as much as 83%, generating additional revenue from the company’s regular subscriptions, CNBC calculated.

An AI pilot in Microsoft 365 will be able to create emails in Outlook, rewrite documents in Word, and provide access to virtually all employee data using a chatbot, reports Reuters.

The program can design presentations, suggest writing tips, wrap up meetings, and rank incoming emails.

The company’s vice president of corporate sales, Jared Spataro, said the new tool will pay for itself in time savings and increased productivity.

What’s new in Microsoft’s Bing search engine for businesses?

Since the announcement of the AI ​​subscription in March, at least 600 businesses have tested it, including Goodyear and General Motors.

The company also said it will make a more secure version of its Bing search engine available to businesses in a bid to address their data protection concerns, increase interest in AI and increase competition from Google.

Bing Chat Enterprise, a search engine bot, is included in subscriptions used by about 160 million workers.

The enterprise version of Bing will not allow you to view or save user data for basic technology training. The company also announced the ability to upload images and search related content, as Google allows.

Bing’s corporate promotion could help efforts to wrest Google’s $2 billion share of search advertising revenue per percentage point of growth.

This is a very strategic move for us, Spataro said.