Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an event commemorating the company’s 50th anniversary at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, April 4, 2025. Microsoft Corp., determined to hold its own in the field of artificial intelligence, will soon allow consumers to tailor the Copilot digital assistant to their own needs.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft will once again expand its employee base, CEO Satya Nadella told investor Brad Gerstner in a podcast released Friday.
The software company’s workforce did not change during fiscal 2025, which ended in June. It stood at 228,000, with multiple rounds of layoffs reducing the total number by at least 6,000. In July, Microsoft laid off another 9,000 workers.
“I will say that we will increase our workforce, but in my opinion, those workforce that we increase will increase with much more leverage than the workforce that we had before AI,” Nadella told the site. BG2 Podcast. OpenAI, which has a broad partnership with Microsoft, introduced its ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft’s workforce increased by 22% in fiscal 2022.
Employees will learn how to do their jobs differently, Nadella said, adding that the company wants to make sure they can access the artificial intelligence features of Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant. These services rely on AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
“It’s the process of unlearning and learning that I think will take about a year and then growth in enrollment will come with maximum leverage,” he said.
A similar adjustment happened in businesses several decades ago, Nadella said. To prepare the forecast, interoffice memos were circulated to multiple sites by fax, followed by email and Excel spreadsheets, he said.
“Right now, all planning, all execution starts with AI. You research with AI, you think with AI, you share with your colleagues and so on,” Nadella said.
This week, Amazonwhich is battling Microsoft to rent cloud infrastructure to run AI models, has cut 14,000 employees.
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of human experience and technology, told workers in a memo that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling businesses to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing and new market segments).”
On the podcast, Nadella talked about a Microsoft executive who deals with fiber networking. As the company ramped up its data center operations to meet growing cloud demand, the executive realized she wouldn’t be able to hire all the people she thought she would need, and so she created AI agents to handle maintenance, Nadella said.
“This is an example of you, a team with AI tools being able to achieve more productivity,” Nadella told Gerstner, founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced 12% year-over-year revenue growth and posted its highest operating margin since 2002.
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