After doing some requested research: The title is clickbait, but there have been changes in Microsoft AI sales targets.
Original Reddit post (posted 15 Dec 2025)
Original article linked in Reddit post from ExtremeTech (posted 10 December 2025)
Microsoft has indeed lowered AI sales targets after "many salespeople missed their quota in the fiscal year ending in June". This supposedly comes from a report from TheInformation. The article is behind a paywall, but when looking at it from archive.is you can see the whole thing. Some quotes from the article:
"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 Microsoftâs Azure cloud unit. Itâs rare for Microsoft to lower such quotas for specific products, the people said."
TheInformation article then goes on to note that AI has been a "boon to Microsoft's business":
"Thatâs largely thanks to new spending by AI firms such as OpenAI, which has projected it would rent about $15 billion worth of cloud servers from Microsoft this year, as well as Microsoftâs sales of AI software such as its 365 Copilot workplace tools and GitHub Copilot coding agent."
However, it also notes that their difficulty has been in getting "traditional businesses" to spend money on advanced forms of AI. Here is exactly what the article says regarding meeting targets:
Less than a fifth of salespeople in that unit met their Foundry sales-growth targets, and in July Microsoft lowered their targets to roughly 25% growth for the current fiscal year compared to the last one, according to a Microsoft salesperson with direct knowledge of the business. The size of the quotas per salesperson for Foundry can range from several tens of thousands of dollars annually to hundreds of thousands, the people said.
In another U.S.-based Azure unit, most salespeople didnât meet an earlier quota of doubling Foundry sales in the fiscal year that ended in June. Their quotas fell to 50% for the current fiscal year, according to another Microsoft salesperson with direct knowledge.
An ArsTechnica article discussing this released information further notes:
Despite these struggles, Microsoft continues to spend heavily on AI infrastructure. The company reported capital expenditures of $34.9 billion for its fiscal first quarter ending in October, a record, and warned that spending would rise further. The Information notes that much of Microsoftâs AI revenue comes from AI companies themselves renting cloud infrastructure rather than from traditional enterprises adopting AI tools for their own operations.
Going back to the original article where this title comes from, it says that:
Other AI companies are just doing better, too. Windows Central reports that OpenAI's ChatGPT commands over 61% of the market, and Google's Gemini is now less than 1% behind Microsoft's 14% with Copilot. That's after a 12% growth over the last quarter, too, suggesting Gemini is well on its way to becoming the real second-place alternative to ChatGPT.
The author ends the article saying:
As for Copilot? I don't know anyone who uses it. Do you? It seems difficult to imagine this feature suddenly changing the way we all use Windows.
Ultimately - remember to read beyond the headline! If it's too good to be true, it may just be.
