Microsoft fiscal 2023 letter to shareholders

About this letter

Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive of Microsoft, addressed this letter to shareholders, colleagues, customers and partners in the company's fiscal 2023 annual report; it is dated 16 October 2023. It was written in the year Microsoft made the Azure OpenAI Service broadly available, and a month after it announced its vision for Copilot.

The letter frames the moment as a new age of AI that will reshape every software category and every business, including Microsoft's own. It sets out three priorities, reports a record $211 billion in revenue and over $88 billion in operating income, and then reviews each area of the business from infrastructure and data to security, LinkedIn and gaming. It closes with four enduring commitments, on opportunity, trust, fundamental rights and sustainability, and with a section on culture.

What to notice

1. 1

   Nadella names the two breakthroughs he says define this era of AI: natural language as the most universal interface, and the emergence of a powerful new reasoning engine over data.

“maximum enterprise value gets created during platform shifts like this one”