Pulse News

**Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Race to Use AI to Drive Sales Gains**

By Aaron Holmes

Mar 4, 2025, 6:00am PST

The role of salespeople is already changing in the era of artificial intelligence, and big tech companies are notching benefits from using these tools, which could be a leading indicator of how the broader industry is set to transform.

At Microsoft, for instance, executives have been touting evidence that custom-built AI tools automating repetitive sales tasks have allowed the company to reduce its sales staff while simultaneously lifting sales revenue. During a gathering of sales teams in Redmond last month, Microsoft sales chief Judson Althoff said rolling out AI tools had improved salespeople's productivity by lifting revenue per salesperson roughly 10%, according to someone at the meeting.

**The Takeaway**

- Microsoft sales leaders say new AI tools have generated revenue growth even as sales staff has declined.

- Revenue per salesperson using AI tools rose 10% over the past year.

- Quotas for some salespeople have risen 30% to 50% since adopting AI tools.

The tools include an AI agent that tracks how much a customer is spending on various products, drawing from Microsoft's internal account data, and drafts emails or meeting agendas suggesting changes to Microsoft licenses to upsell customers, according to three Microsoft employees who have used them.

Amazon and Google, meanwhile, have both built similar internal AI tools meant to steer staff toward closing bigger deals, and they are already saving money thanks to the tools, according to executives at those companies. Microsoft is aiming to sell customers on similar AI tools. To do so, it is competing directly with Salesforce, which has rolled out its own suite of AI products geared toward automating low-level sales tasks, as well as with startups like OpenAI, which recently built a sales agent that SoftBank is licensing for its companies in Japan, along with other applications like ChatGPT.

All the tech firms have struggled to sell AI applications to businesses, which have been cautious about deploying them at a large scale. Microsoft has already pitched its labor-saving potential for sales teams. Microsoft's own experience, however, provides a potentially compelling argument. Microsoft’s Althoff said at the sales meeting last month that use of AI helped the company deliver a record $245 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, lifting its gross profit margin to 69.7% compared to 68.9% the year prior. The growth comes as the number of salespeople in Althoff's unit has fallen roughly 4% to 45,000 as of July from its pre-layoff peak in early 2023.

One AI sales agent Microsoft is using internally can track what products customers are buying and suggest ways for salespeople to nudge customers to spend more. For instance, the tool might flag that a specific customer has been spending heavily on Microsoft Entra ID, a security software for tracking logins. The tool could also draft a sales pitch offering the customer a discount in exchange for bundling Entra ID with other security products like Microsoft Defender, a larger overall commitment. Salespeople previously had to carry out that sort of work manually, according to the employees.

Meanwhile, some Microsoft salespeople's quotas have risen as much as 50% over the past year, according to the three people. Using the AI software has made hitting those targets easier, one of the people said. Microsoft typically makes top-down changes to employee compensation plans around May, ahead of the start of its new fiscal year in July. However, Microsoft has not increased seller quotas across the board in relation to its use of AI tools, according to a company spokesperson.

**Cloud War Arms**

Similar AI sales tools have taken root at other major cloud firms whose salespeople are jockeying for the same customers as Microsoft. Amazon Web Services—Microsoft's biggest competitor in cloud computing—has been rolling out in-house AI tools for its salespeople, according to AWS's director, Shaown Nandi. The company built one tool called Account Summaries, using models from Amazon, Anthropic, and others, that sends salespeople a Slack message ahead of each customer meeting, including details of how the customer has been using AWS products and what similar products they may be amenable to spend more on.

AWS's tens of thousands of salespeople are using the tool, and it has increased the value of opportunities, or the amount AWS projects a customer will spend in the future, by roughly 5% on average, which Nandi said is an "indirect" signal that revenue will rise. AWS doesn't currently offer the Account Summaries tool as a product its customers can buy for their own salespeople. However, it does sell a more generic chatbot called Q that can handle similar tasks, and customers can build their own bespoke AI tools using its cloud platform, Nandi said. Nandi said the AI products haven't affected the company's sales head count. But the tools have made it easier for AWS to quickly train salespeople on new clients after the company restructured its sales teams last year, he said, noting that without the tool they might have had to spend more money to hire additional support staff for the reorganization.

Google Cloud salespeople, meanwhile, have been using a similar set of tools developed internally. This set includes an RFP Accelerator that lets salespeople enter customers' requests for proposals and then drafts the proposal based on the customer's account data. The tool has cut down the amount of time salespeople spend on such proposals by roughly 50%, said Google Cloud Vice President Oliver Parker. Google doesn't have immediate plans to bring the RFP Accelerator to market, but Parker says customers can recreate it using AI functions in existing Google products like NotebookLM. (Google Cloud carried out several rounds of performance-based layoffs over the past year, including last week, but Parker said sales teams' use of AI hasn't directly factored into the company's head count decisions.)

Companies looking for savings have an appetite for such tools. For instance, cybersecurity firm Sysdig has been testing various AI tools to automate sales functions such as drafting responses to customers' requests for proposals, said the company's chief financial officer, Karen Walker. She noted that the tools have saved on the cost of hiring more salespeople over the past year. "Now I have a way to scale my sales operations, and I'm not going to need as much additional head count," Walker said.

But Microsoft's suite of AI sales products could also face headwinds from the falling cost of AI models across the board. Walker declined to comment on whether Sysdig has used Microsoft's software, but she said the company has been experimenting with cheaper open-source models that have come out in the past year, and in some cases it has built AI tools based on those models. Overall, the rapidly falling cost of models has slightly decreased the company's overall AI spending in the past six months, even as it has rolled out AI tools to more employees and customers, Walker said.