Microsoft shares jumped as much as 4% on Friday, reaching $516.39 in afternoon trading, after the company announced a sweeping overhaul of its Copilot AI assistant and received two bullish analyst updates. The software giant has merged its consumer and workplace Copilot products into a single enterprise-focused application built around three core tools: a home chat hub, a coding tool, and an autonomous agent called Autopilot.
The redesigned app lets users edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly inside Copilot. The new coding feature uses GitHub Copilot technology so non-technical employees can create applications and workflows with plain language, running inside an IT-controlled sandbox. Autopilot is designed to operate as a persistent digital coworker inside a company's own cloud environment, handling multi-step background tasks with assigned permissions and governance controls.
Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz raised his Microsoft price target to $570 from $515 while keeping an Outperform rating, citing customers increasingly standardizing on Microsoft as their main enterprise AI platform. Stifel analyst Brad Reback upgraded the stock from Hold to Buy and lifted his target to $575 from $530, implying roughly 11% upside. Reback argued that Microsoft has 'clearly turned the corner' and can sustain strong Azure growth while improving operational efficiency.
Microsoft is also shifting part of its AI pricing to a usage-based model. Everyday chat remains a fixed subscription, but longer agentic tasks will be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. This follows the company surpassing 30 million paid Copilot enterprise subscriptions, though fewer than 7% of its more than 450 million commercial Office 365 seats currently license the AI addition. The company hopes the new enterprise focus, governance features and cost-management tools will accelerate adoption, while analysts flagged AI disruption and enterprise spending pull-forward as key risks.
