Microsoft executives are convinced a compute platform shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) is right around the corner, though investors seem wary of the hyperscaler's recent efforts to be at the leading edge of this anticipated shift.

Recent macroeconomic uncertainty has resulted in Microsoft's cloud customers seeking to realize more value with less tech spend. CEO Satya Nadella's solution to those conditions is a platform shift, because that's where "maximum enterprise value gets created," he said during the company's second-quarter earnings call.

From Microsoft's perspective, "the next major wave of computing is being born, as we turn the world’s most advanced AI models into a new computing platform," Nadella touted. "The age of AI is upon us, and Microsoft is powering it."

The building of applications in 2023 isn't going to look the same as it did two or three years ago, the CEO added. "They’re all going to have considerations around how [is] my AI inference performance cost model ... going to look like. And that’s where we are well-positioned again," he explained.

But in its efforts to hit that AI leader status Microsoft claims to have reached, the cloud provider invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind the natural language processor ChatGPT and autoregressive language model ChatGPT-3.

During the Q&A portion of the earnings call, however, investors aired concerns about the true depth of functionality tied to Microsoft's substantial investments in OpenAI. So far, the most fruitful outcomes of those investments seem to be OpenAI's sole use of Microsoft Azure cloud services and the integration of OpenAI models with Microsoft compute via the Azure OpenAI service.

One investor asked when OpenAI's functionality will "expand beyond just sort of the Azure OpenAI services, and when we’re going to start to see some of the positive impacts" more broadly.

To back the pursuit of this venture, Nadella reiterated his expectation that AI will define the next era of compute. "A lot of the enterprise value gets created by just being able to catch these waves, and then have those waves impact every part of our tech stack," he said.

"The core of Azure, or what is considered cloud computing, fundamentally changes in its nature and how compute, storage, and network come together. That’s, in some sense, under the radar, if you will. For the last three and a half, four years, we’ve been working very, very hard to build both the training supercomputers, and now of course, the inference infrastructure, because once you use AI inside of your applications it goes from just being training heavy to inference. That’s sort of, I think, core Azure itself has been transformed and the infrastructure business is being transformed," Nadella said.

While he stressed both the investment and commercial partnership aspects to Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship, "fundamentally, it’s going to be something that’s going to drive, I think, innovation and competitive differentiation in every one of the Microsoft solutions by leading in AI," he said.

Microsoft’s deep dive into AI has also impacted recent layoffs at the cloud provider. In an email to employees earlier this week announcing 10,000 job cuts, Nadella explained the next wave of computing will be “born with advances in AI,” suggesting automation and AI could limit Microsoft’s need for human headcount.

After its AI investments and taking a $1.2 billion charge tied to job cuts, the company still posted $52.7 billion in Q2 revenues, a 2% increase from the second quarter of last year. Microsoft’s cloud revenue also grew 22% year-over-year, totaling $27 billion.