Tech CEOs wax lyrical about AI, but substantial revenue additions will take time. Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google-parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) touted AI investments for the second quarter in a row, but their Tuesday results indicated that revenue growth would be moderate.

The tech giants’ offerings promise generative AI, which generates new text, pictures, and code from old data. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, powered by Microsoft, popularized the phrase.

“The world’s most advanced AI models are coming together with the world’s most universal user interface – natural language – to create a new era of computing,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday.

Reuters found that S&P 500 (.SPX) firms’ quarterly conference calls had utilized “AI” roughly twice as often as in the previous quarter.

On Tuesday’s first-quarter conference, Google used the word 52 times, up from 45 in the fourth. Microsoft stated it 36 times to 20 for OpenAI.

Both firms stated AI was already boosting sales, but neither specified when or if they would break out AI sales, expenses, or profits.

On Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai remarked, “Lots more to come,” after mentioning some of last month’s products, including Bard, Google’s answer to Bing’s ChatGPT-powered search chatbot.

Google reported quarterly profit and revenue above projections and announced a $70 billion stock buyback.

Last week, it said it would merge Google Brain and DeepMind to develop “multimodal” AI like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can produce new material from the text and visual suggestions.

“The announcements are there, and things will move rapidly. “I think it’s going to take some time to see real meaty results,” said Globalt Investments senior portfolio manager Thomas Martin.

“As far as working it into actual numbers… think about how long it took Google to break out YouTube just as an example,” he added, adding that anything meaningful was unlikely to appear on statements for over a year.

Microsoft’s chief of investor relations, Brett Iversen, told Reuters that “it’s really early” and that AI constituted a modest component of Microsoft’s company.

Nadella said over 10,000 firms, including Coca-Cola (KO.N) and General Motors (GM.N), have signed up for Microsoft’s AI “Copilot” development tool in three months. In addition, word, Excel, and Outlook tools use the tool.

Microsoft’s cloud computing and Office productivity software divisions helped it outperform Tuesday’s quarterly sales and profit projections.

Bing has been behind Google search for decades, but Nadella indicated that AI features had increased Bing downloads and daily users to 100 million.

“Ultimately, it may be a much larger impact to Microsoft’s enterprise software and perhaps less so in search,” said Madison Investments portfolio manager Haruki Toyama.

Toyama said Google had utilized AI to commercialize search engines and did not anticipate competing AI breakthroughs as dangerous as some imagined.

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) reports next week, while Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) reports on Wednesday.

Meta, which admits it is behind in AI, has produced an AI model to identify objects in images. In addition, AWS, the world’s largest cloud provider, has launched tools to assist other organizations in building AI-powered chatbots.

Meta climbed 2.3% and Amazon 5.3% after the market on Tuesday.