It has become a common practice for Microsoft to undergo some form of restructuring at the end of each fiscal year. Last May, the tech giant laid off 3% of its workforce, or roughly 6,000 employees. More layoffs will be announced early next month, according to reports.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Bloomberg’s Brody Ford and Matt Day earlier this week reported that Microsoft will announce more redundancies as it draws near June 30, the company’s end of fiscal year. It was claimed that the layoff this time would affect the sales and marketing team.
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However, a Microsoft spokesperson has said that it had nothing to confirm regarding any new workforce changes. As of June 2024, Microsoft had 228,000 employees. Around 45,000 of that number was in sales and marketing.
The sales and marketing team is the third-largest in terms of workforce behind Operations (86,000) and product research and development (81,000). There have been claims that the recent cuts at Microsoft are because of its increasing focus on artificial intelligence.
The tech giant has neither confirmed nor refuted this claim. However, a research report from the company earlier this week hinted at a future with smaller teams assisted by AI across many industries.
Angelia NG, the deputy project manager at ST Electronics, claimed the July layoff will affect around 0.02% of employees, or roughly 1,000, which will bring the total job cuts in the company this year to over 9,000.
Angelia also mentioned that Microsoft has an $80 billion capital expenditure plan this fiscal year and that most of it would be spent on expanding data centers to ease capacity bottlenecks for AI services.
There is still an ongoing debate on whether AI is actually taking people’s jobs or just making them more efficient. We would love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment below.
