© Reuters Wall Street Analysts Bullish on Microsoft (MSFT) Bing and Edge ChatGPT Integration
By Sam Boughedda
After Microsoft (NASDAQ:) unveiled its new AI-powered Bing and Edge offerings, which it said are “reinventing search,” Wall Street analysts reacted extremely positively.
Microsoft said Tuesday it is launching an all-new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser to “deliver better search, richer responses, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content.”
The tech giant stated that it thinks of the tools as an AI co-pilot for the web.
Oppenheimer analysts raised the company’s price target to $280, maintaining an upper rating on the stock, stating that the move to integrate ChatGPT was “well-wired” and view Microsoft as “structurally advantageous to leverage OpenAI, as well as its own technology, maintaining its core while disrupting adjacencies.
Bernstein analysts said these are “the first green shoots of the OpenAI partnership.”
“This is just the beginning, and we think more use cases will follow relatively quickly,” said the analysts, who rate Microsoft higher. “This will drive both revenue and bottom line growth, and while margins may grow gradually slower, the AI platform Microsoft has built will offer margin improvement as it scales.”
Wolfe Research analysts titled their research note “MSFT – Hey Google, we’re Bing-ing the p(AI)n.”
“MSFT has been investing ahead of this for years, can spread the cost across its entire product portfolio, and is planning a number of monetization avenues,” wrote the analysts, who maintained an outperform rating on Microsoft. “We believe the ubiquity of AI value support across MSFT’s product portfolio creates an incremental monetization opportunity across nearly all products, and while any of them are unlikely to be a magnitude increase in incremental dollars aggregates (except Search), they are all potentially gross profit accrues across the entire product stack.”
Microsoft shares rose more than 1% on Wednesday.
