Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Tuesday, January 14th, and I'm your host, Kim Khan. Our top story so far.

Morgan Stanley's most recent Chief Information Officer survey shows that Microsoft is in pole position

for generative artificial intelligence, especially as agentic AI comes into focus.

Analysts Keith Weiss says, agentic AI, a type of AI that can make decisions, learn, and act

on its own, is seen as the most underappreciated part of Microsoft's generative AI prowess,

as 66% of CIOs said they will most likely use the company as their vendor of choice.

The fourth quarter survey showed that CIOs expect to grow spending on software

by roughly 30 basis points year over year to 3.8%.

As such, Microsoft is seen as the best

position franchise to gain from an improving spending backdrop with CIO's weighted average

growth expectations at up 6.5% in 2025, 1.5% higher versus 4Q23 CIO survey.

Weiss has an overweight rating and a $548 price target on Microsoft.

He added that Microsoft Azure is once again the CIO's preferred public cloud vendor.

54% of application workloads are now inside Azure, with the expectation that will remain

durable over the next three years.

Look into the economy, cool wholesale inflation numbers

were met with a lukewarm market response.

The December producer price index rose 0.2%,

lower than the 0.4% consensus, and November's 0.4% increase.

The annual rate rose to 3.3%, shy of the 3.5% forecast.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, core PPI was unchanged.

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