Microsoft

Microsoft is OpenAI’s largest investor and partner, and is integrating AI into Office, Windows, Azure, and Copilot.

Microsoft is an American IT company that grew with Windows and Office, and maintains the world's highest market capitalization with its cloud platform, Azure. By making large investments early on in OpenAI, the company has become the biggest beneficiary of the generative AI boom.

The core of the strategy is Copilot. By embedding AI assistants in all of its products, including Word, Excel, Teams, Windows, and even the development tool GitHub, the company is already selling AI within software used by companies around the world. The relationship of exclusively supplying OpenAI models to the Azure cloud is also a major competitive advantage.

However, as OpenAI increases its independence, the relationship between the two companies alternates between cooperation and tension, and securing its own model capabilities is considered a challenge. The market is concerned about whether astronomical investments in AI infrastructure will lead to profits.

✅ Strengths

• It has benefited the most from the generative AI boom through its proactive partnership with OpenAI
• It has a clear sales channel by combining AI with essential corporate software such as Office and Windows
• Cloud Azure is growing rapidly by absorbing the demand for AI

⚠️ Limits

• Changes in the relationship with OpenAI remain a major variable in the business
• Its own front-line model capabilities are assessed to be relatively weak
• There are doubts in the market about the possibility of recovering the enormous investment in AI facilities