Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a 50th anniversary event at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on April 4, 2025. Determined to maintain its position in the artificial intelligence field, Microsoft will soon allow consumers to customize the Copilot digital assistant to suit their needs.
David Ryder Bloomberg | Getty Images
microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investor Brad Gerstner on a podcast Friday that the company is expanding its employee base again.
The software maker’s headcount remained unchanged in its 2025 fiscal year, which ends in June. The company employs 228,000 people, with the total number reduced by at least 6,000 due to several rounds of layoffs. In July, Microsoft laid off another 9,000 employees.
“We say we’re going to grow our workforce, but my view is that that workforce is going to grow much more impactfully than our pre-AI workforce,” Nadella said on the BG2 podcast. OpenAI, which has an extensive partnership with Microsoft, introduced the ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft’s headcount grew 22% in fiscal year 2022.
Nadella said employees will find ways to work differently, adding that the company wants to ensure employees have access to the artificial intelligence capabilities of Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant. These services are powered by AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
“I think there will be an unlearning process over the next year or so, and then the headcount increases will have the greatest impact,” he said.
Nadella said similar adjustments were made in companies decades ago. To create the forecast, interoffice memos were circulated by fax to multiple sites, then email and Excel spreadsheets came along, he said.
“Today, every plan, every execution starts with AI. Research with AI, think with AI, share with your colleagues, share what you have,” Nadella said.
this week, Amazonwhich competes with Microsoft to rent cloud infrastructure to run AI models, has cut its corporate workforce by 14,000.
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, told employees in a memo that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology since the Internet, and it is enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and entirely new market segments).”
On his podcast, Nadella talked about Microsoft executives working with network fiber. As the company ramped up its data center operations to meet growing cloud demand, Nadella said executives realized they couldn’t hire all the talent they thought they needed, so they built an AI agent to handle maintenance.
“This is an example of how, as you say, teams can be more productive with AI tools in place,” Nadella told Gerstner, founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.
Microsoft on Wednesday reported a 12% year-over-year increase in revenue and its highest operating profit margin since 2002.
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