san francisco alphabet incs google and microsoft corp whose quarterly earnings each got a boost from their established search and cloudcomputing businesses used their time with investors to emphasize whats next artificial intelligencein their respective earnings calls on tuesday the tech giants which are becoming rivals in the competition for the future of search offered up starkly different assessments of just how much disruption is in store for the market google executives encouraged investors to trust in the companys long track record as the worlds leading search engine and framed ai as just another shift in its constantly evolving business microsoft suggested that something much more dramatic is underwayinvestors seemed to like microsofts thesis better sending its shares up as much as 97 in extended trading while alphabet increased less than 2until recently google was viewed as all but invincible in the market for online search which it dominates worldwide that changed with the debut of openais wildly popular chatbot chatgpt microsoft has begun weaving openais technology into its bing search engine and the partnership has ratcheted up pressure on google to reinvent its core search business to allow for more of the conversational exchanges that generative ai makes possiblespeaking to analysts alphabet chief executive officer sundar pichai stressed that google is investing heavily in ai yet he downplayed what the technology would mean for the search advertising business which remains the companys lifeblood he expressed optimism that users will continue to value online advertising even if their searches yield a summary composed by a large language model rather than the familiar list of links that google has long deliveredthroughout the years we have gone through many many shifts in search pichai said and as we have evolved search i think weve always had a strong grounded approach in terms of how we evolve ads as wellyet microsoft ceo satya nadella suggested his company is a formidable challenger he said app installations have quadrupled since the launch of the aipowered bing in february he added that bing took share in the us market in the quarter without offering specific metrics we look forward to continuing this journey in what is a generational shift in the largest software category search nadella said on the companys earnings callbillions of dollars in revenue could be up for grabs with even relatively small changes in market share but in the past quarter at least googles search business appeared to be weathering the heightened competitive threats and a broader downturn in the digital advertising market the companys revenue from search and related businesses rose to almost 404 billion in the period ended march 31 besting analysts estimatesas google moves to incorporate generative ai into search pichai said the company would draw on its institutional knowledge well be guided by data and years of experience about what people want and our high standards for quality pichai said and well test and iterate as we go because we know that billions of people trust google to