Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood lays out an A.I. investment roadmap

There’s apparently no such thing as talking up your own A.I. investments too much this year. But apparently there can be collateral damage—for your competitors. At least that’s what Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” said.

On Tuesday, Microsoft reported its earnings for the quarter ending June 30. Cramer believes comments by the tech giant’s CFO Amy Hood resulted in Amazon trading lower. 

He said the following on X (what the platform originally known as Twitter is now called): “Amazon is not down because of a (weak) FTC, it is down because of comments made by Amy Hood, the CFO of Microsoft, who talked about the need to spend for A.I. despite its lead, and what it could mean for cloud costs…”

On Tuesday, Amazon closed at $129.13, and Microsoft released its Q2 earnings aftermarket that day. On Wednesday, Amazon opened at $126.38 and closed at $128.15. (The stock price has gone down about 4% in the past five days.)

Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure are certainly going head to head in cloud computing. Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service provides access to OpenAI’s large language models (Microsoft first invested $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019; the investment has since grown to at least $13 billion).

For the quarter, Azure and other cloud services had revenue growth of 26% year over year, down one percentage point from the quarter prior. Overall for the quarter, revenue at Microsoft reached $56.19 billion, beating analysts’ expectations of $55.49 billion, and income was $20.1 billion, increased by 20%.

But during the earnings call, Hood didn’t mince words that there will be a lot of spending on A.I. before there’s a payoff. She said that for Microsoft’s current 2024 fiscal year, ending in June 2024, the payoff would mainly come in the second half of the fiscal year.

“Even with strong demand and a leadership position, growth from our A.I. services will be gradual as Azure A.I. scales and our Copilots reach general availability dates,” she said. “To support our Microsoft Cloud growth and demand for our A.I. platform, we will accelerate investment in our cloud infrastructure.”
Hood said the company expects capital expenditures to “increase sequentially” each quarter through the year as “we scale to meet demand signals.”

In after-hours trading on Tuesday night, MSFT shares fell as much as 4%, as investors absorbed the message of how long it will take to start seeing A.I. generate profits. Wedbush managing director and tech analyst Dan Ives says that Microsoft is on the right track. “We believe a year from now Microsoft joins Apple in the $3 trillion club with a $400 valuation, the base case for this cloud stalwart, in our opinion,” Ives wrote in a note released this morning.

Hood has been playing the long game for a long time: She joined the company in 2002, and for the past nine years, has served as EVP and CFO, and a strategic partner to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft credits her with playing a key role in advancing the global momentum in cloud and helping digitally transform the company throughout her tenure.

“I define my role as making Microsoft a place our customers, partners, and employees want to pick every day,” Hood said at Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit back in 2018. “If you do that, you also create a culture that you want.”

So far, during this week’s earnings calls, Microsoft wasn’t the only tech company continually referring to A.I. “This is our seventh year as an A.I.-first company, and we intuitively know how to incorporate A.I. into our products,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Tuesday.

“A.I. is driving results across our monetization tools, through our automated ads products, which we call Meta Advantage,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. “Almost all our advertisers are using at least one of our A.I. driven products…Our investments in A.I. continue.”

Amazon will announce its second quarter 2023 financial results on Aug. 3. I think it’s safe to say we can expect plenty of A.I. on that call too.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Big deal

A new report by Pew Research Center finds that in 2022, 19% of American workers were in jobs that are the most exposed to A.I. (meaning the most important activities may be either replaced or assisted by A.I.).

Employees with a bachelor’s degree or more (27%) are more than twice as likely as those with a high school diploma only (12%) to see the most exposure. Positions with a high level of exposure to A.I. tend to be in higher-paying fields where a college education and analytical skills can be a plus, according to Pew. By demographics, a greater share of women (21%) employees, than men (17%) are likely to see the most exposure to A.I. And Asian (24%) and White (20%) workers are more exposed than Black (15%) and Hispanic (13%) workers, according to Pew's research.

Going deeper

The inaugural edition of the Fortune China 500 list was released this week. It ranks the country's largest companies by revenue. At the No. 1 spot is State Grid. The methodology is consistent with Fortune Global 500. Companies are ranked by total revenues for their respective fiscal years ended on or before March 31, 2023. 

Leaderboard

Alexandra Brooks was promoted to EVP and CFO at Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: HTZ), effective immediately. Brooks served as the company's interim CFO since April 2023 and chief accounting officer since 2020. She also previously served as SVP of Internal Audit at Hertz. Before joining Hertz, Brooks was VP of Internal Audit at Aptiv PLC, the CFO for Champion Windows and Home Exteriors, and held a variety of leadership roles at the General Electric Company and the General Motors Company. Brooks began her career with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Scott J. McKim was named EVP and CFO at BayFirst Financial Corp. (Nasdaq: BAFN) and its wholly-owned subsidiary, St. Petersburg, Fla.-based BayFirst National Bank. A 25-year industry veteran, McKim joins BayFirst from 121 Financial Credit Union, where he served as chief strategy officer since June 2022. He previously held the roles of CFO and chief lending officer of Publix Employees Federal Credit Union and chief lending officer for American Heritage Federal Credit Union. Before that, McKim served in leadership roles at multiple financial institutions, including director of corporate finance and a divisional CFO for Huntington Bancshares.

Overheard

In his responses to journalists, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell did a great job of walking the optionality tightrope by sounding more hawkish than he probably feels. He highlighted that further tightening could be warranted without pre-committing to such an eventuality. The Fed Chair noted that it was “certainly possible that [policymakers] would raise funds again at the September meeting if the data warranted it, but it’s also possible that [policymakers] would choose to hold steady.”

—EY Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco wrote in a note on Wednesday regarding Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's announcement that the Fed is raising the federal funds rate range by 25 basis points to 5.25%-5.50%. This is "more than likely marking the end of a historic tightening cycle," Daco wrote. "Still, Fed Chair Powell made every effort to sound as hawkish as possible during the press conference to avoid an undesired easing of financial conditions."