Microsoft Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff said this week during a closed presentation that AI tools are improving productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software development and are already saving companies big bucks, Bloomberg reports.
Among other things, Altoff said that artificial intelligence saved Microsoft more than $500 million last year in its call centers alone and increased the satisfaction of both employees and customers.
The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Altoff said. That effort is just getting started, but it's already generating tens of millions of dollars, he said.
Microsoft declined to comment on these allegations.
Althoff said AI generated 35 percent of the code for new Microsoft products, speeding up their launch. The company's GitHub Copilot is the market leader in AI coding tools, with 15 million users, Microsoft said in April.
The rise of AI has fueled concerns about the potential for many workers to be replaced by AI, especially in the tech industry. Microsoft has announced it will cut about 15,000 jobs this year, with the latest wave of layoffs targeting customer-facing staff such as sales.
Altoff emphasized that AI can make employees more effective salespeople. Thanks to the use of the Copilot AI assistant, each salesperson finds more leads, closes deals faster and earns 9% more revenue, Microsoft's chief commercial officer emphasized.