---
title: "Standard Issue AI"
description: "Explore how AI is becoming standard business infrastructure, with Azure OpenAI growing 194%, Copilot reaching 1.3M users, and why small language models matter."
categories: ["AI","data analysis"]
keywords: ["Azure OpenAI","GitHub Copilot","Power Platform","small language models","AI infrastructure","Cosmos DB","data analysis","generative AI","venture capital","AI productivity"]
ai_summary: "AI is becoming essential for businesses, with significant growth in Azure OpenAI and small language models enhancing productivity."
date: 2024-02-02
lastmod: 2026-07-21
canonical_url: https://www.tomtunguz.com/ai-standard-issue/
author: "Tomasz Tunguz"
---

> "For some companies, [AI is] going to be standard issue like a PC."

It's not just for some. Many companies are moving in this direction. Across Microsoft products, OpenAI infrastructure, Github CoPilot (for coding), & Power Platform (for Office users) the growth is spectacular. 

|   |   |   |   |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
|**Calendar Quarter**|**Azure OpenAI Orgs, k**|**CoPilot Users, m**|**Power Platform Orgs, k**|
|**1/1/24**|53|1.3|230|
|**10/1/23**|18|1|126|
|**7/1/23**|11||63|
|**4/1/23**|2.5||36|

OpenAI & Power Platform organizations have doubled or tripled in the last quarter.

There are more insights in Microsoft most recent earnings calls.

Microsoft's document database, Cosmos, grew 42% annually, driven by AI. This shows the explosive growth of vector databases. 

> "Cosmos DB is the go-to database to build AI-powered apps at any scale... Cosmos DB data transactions increased 42% year-over-year."

Small-language models are coming. The consensus within the data ecosystem is that many will start with more expensive large-language models which are robust to many types of questions, but perhaps too expensive to run for most applications at scale. 
> "We have also built the world's most popular SLMs, which offer performance comparable to larger models but are small enough to run on a laptop or mobile device."

SLMs promise to offer superior latency, better accuracy, at a lower cost, at the expense of specialization. This is the first time Microsoft has mentioned SLMs during its earnings calls. 

> "Our own research as well as external studies show as much as 70% improvement in productivity using generative AI for specific work tasks."

Compare with [ServiceNow's data that shows engineering gains of 50%](https://tomtunguz.com/now-earnings/). If this data point is real, then AI could very well [add several percentage points to GDP.](https://tomtunguz.com/llm-impact-gdp/)


> "In Azure, we expect Q3 revenue growth in constant currency to remain stable to our stronger-than-expected Q2 results."

This wave isn't slowing. Azure is projecting constant growth next quarter : another 30% to the $20b+ product line in annual growth.

This stellar growth presages strong demand across both agents & copilots in software, greater demand for databases for storing data, & compute power models.