The word “AI” found 75 mentions in the earnings call of Alphabet (Google), 61 mentions in the earnings call of Microsoft, and 87 mentions in the earnings call of Meta, collectively taking the number of times this buzzword was mentioned to over 220. These three Big Tech companies are betting big on AI and are making that loud and clear.
Alphabet
“We see AI as a foundational platform shift and are excited about the opportunities across our business.” — Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai spoke about the role of AI across the following main areas:
- Google Search: The company is focused on integrating AI into its popular Google Search through the experimental Search Generative Experience (SGE). “With Generative AI applied to Search, we can serve a wider range of information needs and answer new types of questions, including those that benefit from multiple perspectives,” Pichai noted. “We have learned a lot from people trying it, and we have added new capabilities, like incorporating videos and images into responses and generating imagery,” he added. Ads in Search remain the priority for Google and SGE will provide more opportunities for advertisers as people are finding ads helpful in the SGE context, Pichai said. “Nearly 80% of our advertisers already use at least one AI-powered search ads product,” Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer for Google, added.
- Google Bard: The second focus of Google is to boost “creativity and productivity” and Bard comes into the picture here. “Bard can now integrate with Google apps and services, showing relevant information from Workspace, Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and Hotels,” Pichai said. “Earlier this month, we announced Assistant with Bard, a personal assistant powered by Generative AI. It combines Bard’s generative and reasoning capabilities with the Assistant’s personalized help. You can interact with it through text, voice, or images, and in the coming months, you’ll be able to opt in on Android and iOS mobile devices,” Pichai added.
- Google Cloud: The third focus area is helping developers and businesses build their own products using AI on Google Cloud. “We offer advanced AI-optimized infrastructure to train and serve models at scale. And today, more than half of all funded Generative AI startups are Google Cloud customers. This includes AI21 Labs, Contextual, Elemental Cognition, Rytr, and more,” Pichai said. Google’s Vertext AI and Duet AI are the primary AI drivers in this segment.
- Google Pixel: Google has introduced many new AI features to its new Pixel 8 series of smartphones. “A new AI-powered editing features in Google Photos on Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro remove distractions, generate the best shot from multiple images and reduce distracting sounds in videos,” Pichai explained.
Financials: For the third quarter of its financial year 2023, Alphabet reported $77 billion in revenue, up 11% year over year, and $19 billion in profit, up 41% year over year.
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Microsoft
“We are rapidly infusing AI across every layer of the tech stack and for every role and business process to drive productivity gains for our customers.” — Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the role of AI across the following main areas:
- Microsoft Azure: “We have the most comprehensive cloud footprint with more than 60 data center regions worldwide, as well as the best AI infrastructure for both training and inference. And we also have our AI services deployed in more regions than any other cloud provider,” Nadella remarked. “Azure AI provides access to best-in-class frontier models from OpenAI and open-source models, including our own, as well as from Meta and Hugging Face, which customers can use to build their own AI apps while meeting cost, latency, and performance needs.”
- GitHub CoPilot: “We have over 1 million paid Copilot users and more than 37,000 organizations that subscribe to Copilot for business, up 40% quarter over quarter, with significant traction outside the United States,” Nadella said. “With GitHub Copilot, we are increasing developer productivity by up to 55% while helping them stay in the flow and bringing the joy back to coding. “
- CoPilot in CRM: “We are becoming the Copilot-led business process transformation layer on top of existing CRM systems like Salesforce. For example, our sales Copilot helps sellers at more than 15,000 organizations, including Rockwell Automation, Sandvik Coromant, Securitas, and Teleperformance personalize customer interactions based on data from third-party CRMs.”
- CoPilot in health: “With DAX Copilot, we are applying generative models to draft high-quality clinical notes in seconds, increasing physician productivity and reducing burnout. For example, Atrium Health, a leading provider in Southeast United States, credits DAX Copilot with helping its physicians each save up to 40 minutes per day in documentation time.”
- CoPilot as an everyday assistant for businesses: “Copilot is your everyday AI assistant, helping you be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams,” Nadella remarked. “Customers tell us that once they use Copilot, they can’t imagine working without it.”
- Windows: “We rolled out the biggest update to Windows 11 ever with 150 new features, including new AI-powered experiences like Clipchamp, Paint and Photos. And we introduced Copilot in Windows, the Everyday AI companion, which incorporates the context of the web, your work data, and what you are doing on the PC to provide better assistance.”
- Bing: “With our Copilots for the web, we are redefining how people use the Internet to search and create. Bing users have engaged in more than 1.9 billion chats, and Microsoft Edge has now gained share for 10 consecutive quarters. This quarter, we introduced new personalized answers, as well as support for DALL·E 3, helping people get more relevant answers and to create incredibly realistic images. More than 1.8 billion images have been created to date.”
Financials: For the first quarter of its financial year 2024, Microsoft reported $56.5 billion in revenue, up 13% year over year, and $22.3 billion in profit, up 164% year over year.
Meta
“In terms of investment priorities, AI will be our biggest investment area in 2024, both in engineering and compute resources.” — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the role of AI across the following main areas:
- Meta AI: “We started rolling out Meta AI, our new assistant that you can access across all our messaging experiences and smart glasses to answer questions, get access to real-time information, and generate photorealistic images.”
- AI Studio: “We started launching our AI Studio platform that enables people to create and interact with lots of different AIs for help getting things done and just having fun.”
- AI for businesses: “We launched an early alpha of business AIs so that eventually every business can have an AI to interface with customers to do sales and support.”
- AI for creators: “We let out the plan to launch creator AIs next year, so every creator can have an AI their fans can engage with to help them build out their community.”
- Llama 2: “We’re also building foundation models like Llama 2, which we believe is now the leading open-source model with more than 30 million Llama downloads last month.”
- AI in recommendation systems: “There was also a different set of sophisticated recommendation AI systems that powers our feeds, Reels, ads, and integrity systems. And this technology has less hype right now than generative AI, but it is also very important in improving very quickly. […] This year alone, we’ve seen a 7% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram as a result of recommendation improvements.”
- AI for advertisers: “Our AI tools for advertisers are also driving results with Advantage+ shopping campaigns, reaching a $10 billion run rate and more than half of our advertisers using our Advantage+ creative tools to optimize images and text in their ads creative,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re increasingly adopting the use of larger, more advanced ads models and using AI to power ads products that provide increased automation to advertisers,” Susan Li, Chief Financial Officer, added.
Financials: For the third quarter of its financial year 2023, Meta reported $34 billion in revenue, up 23% year over year, and $11.5 billion in profit, up 27% year over year.
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