Microsoft's stock falls on reported AI sales woes. Should investors worry?

By Britney Nguyen

Adjusting sales quotas early in the fiscal year is not surprising, says one analyst who sees weakness in the stock as a buying opportunity

Microsoft shares fell Wednesday after a report said the company had lowered some sales and growth targets.

The latest source of Wall Street debate is a report saying that Microsoft lowered sales-growth targets for some artificial-intelligence software.

To investors who have been increasingly concerned about a bubble, the report came as validation that AI isn't so easy to monetize. But some analysts on Wall Street said investors shouldn't be worried.

At the center of the debate is a report from The Information, which said Microsoft (MSFT) had lowered quotas across a number of divisions after salespeople missed targets for certain AI products in the fiscal year that ended in June. The story cited people in Microsoft's Azure cloud unit.

Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne wrote in a Wednesday note that it is still early in the current fiscal year, and that "the key with quota setting is not to make it too hard or too easy to clear the bar."

Therefore, Materne said he doesn't "view quota adjustments, especially at the product level, as a huge surprise" at this point in the year.

Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein thinks Microsoft's move wouldn't necessarily have been a sudden decision, meaning the company's guidance for Azure growth likely already factored in the lowered quotas when the company reported earnings results in October.

See more: Why Microsoft's stock fell in the face of upbeat earnings

"We do not even know how high the prior sales quotas were" between last year and this year, Klein said. "Maybe they were artificially too high and are much more realistic and still pretty good."

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement shared with MarketWatch that the article "inaccurately combines the concepts of growth and sales quotas, which shows their lack of understanding of the way a sales organization works and is compensated."

The spokesperson said that "aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered."

The company's Foundry platform, which allows users to develop and deploy AI agents and applications, is reportedly one of the offerings for which sales quotas were lowered. Cutting targets is uncommon for the tech giant and could reflect a resistance to new products, The Information said.

However, Foundry only makes up "a tiny part of Azure," Materne said. While cuts aren't a great look for the company, they "might speak more to the fact that both Snowflake and Databricks are formidable competitors/partners in this area and there could be a view that it's better to partner [versus] compete at certain levels of the stack," he said.

Recapping a recent meeting with the company, Materne said Microsoft "could not be more direct that demand is strong, especially for Azure," which is seeing demand overtake capacity.

Microsoft's stock fell as much as 3% on Wednesday morning and ended the day off 2.5%.

Taken together with recent market jitters over OpenAI's dominance after the release of Google's (GOOG) (GOOGL) Gemini 3, Materne said he isn't surprised that the report sent Microsoft's stock down.

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"We would be using the weakness as a buying opportunity into 2026," Materne said.

Klein, meanwhile, said the report "is backward looking to June [versus] forward looking."

-Britney Nguyen

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12-03-25 1857ET