About 9,000 jobs are to be shed by Microsoft in its latest round of layoffs as the company looks to adopt more AI and streamline management and sales.
In May the technology company signalled it was going to cut 3-4% of its 230,000-strong workforce as it invests in and implements artificial intelligence infrastructure. About 5,300 workers at the firm are based in the UK.
Initially it made about 6,000 workers redundant, many of which were software engineering roles, but now it has announced a further 9,000 jobs will go around the world including its sales division and Xbox video game business.
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A Microsoft spokesperson said: “We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace.”
The company said it wanted to use new technologies to “empower employees to spend more time focusing on meaningful work” while streamlining processes, products, procedures and roles to become more efficient.
The cuts to software engineering jobs demonstrated how AI code-writing products could reduce the number of people needed for programming jobs across the entire IT industry.
Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft, said earlier this year that “maybe 20, 30 per cent of the code” for some of Microsoft’s coding projects “are probably all written by software.”
Microsoft’s decision is in line with the other giant technology companies, which have announced job cuts.
Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said earlier this year that it would cut about 5% of its “lowest performers”, or 3,600 workers.
Alphabet’s Google has also laid off hundreds of employees in the past year, while Amazon has cut jobs in its books division, having earlier laid off employees in its devices and services unit, and communications staff.
According to Business Insider, Microsoft had begun asking some managers to evaluate employees based on how much they use AI internally, before announcing the job cuts.
Business Insider quoted an email to managers from Julia Liuson, president of the Microsoft division responsible for developer tools, who wrote that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”
Last week, recruitment analyst Adzuna revealed that there appeared to be a link between the disappearance of many entry level jobs and the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022.
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