If it wasn't clear before which businesses were driving Microsoft, there's no shadow of a doubt now.

The tech giant late Wednesday announced some major changes to its public reporting structure that will give investors more visibility into its cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence business. The changes will take effect in fiscal 2027.

Microsoft stock rose 2.5% to $509.40 on Thursday morning. Shares have traded sideways over the past 12 months and entered the Thursday trading session up 2.7% for the year.

Microsoft has consolidated its three historical operating segments of productivity and business processes, intelligence cloud, and more personal computing into two new segments: agents and infrastructure, and devices and consumer.

The move comes as Microsoft's historical distinction between productivity and business processes and intelligent cloud segments have become increasingly less representative of a "technology stack where infrastructure, applications and AI services increasingly operate together," according to Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Wood.

Wood noted the new reporting structure brings together Microsoft's commercial cloud and software businesses under a single reporting structure, while the devices and consumer segment consolidates the company's consumer-oriented businesses.

That's a big change for Microsoft and one that should be welcomed by Wall Street as strong growth from Azure, the company's cloud-computing platform, and CoPilot, the Microsoft's AI-power assistant tool, have become a major part of the investing thesis.

The new reporting structure, importantly, removes GitHub and other developer cloud services from Azure, giving investors a more focused look at the key business.

Citi analyst Tyler Radke wrote Thursday that the adjustments align more closely to how Microsoft thinks about its business segments and that there will be "greater transparency with the subsequent disclosure of Azure revenue dollars as this should increase comparability vs. hyperscaler peers."

"We view this as a sign of confidence in the business, and note the Azure segment moves closer to pure-play compute/consumption workloads," Radke added.

While Wall Street will get a better understanding of Azure, there are some drawbacks. Morgan Stanley argued that investors will now have "reduced visibility into the profitability of Microsoft's individual businesses." While they used to see gross and operating margin disclosures across three segments, that will soon be reduced to "two significantly broader segments without standalone equivalents for the underlying businesses."

Wall Street will just have to adjust Microsoft and the new realities as AI transforms the technology industry.