Microsoft to Expand Hiring With ‘More Leverage’ From AI, Says CEO Satya Nadella

In a 31 October podcast, CEO Satya Nadella informed investor Brad Gerstner that Microsoft will once again increase its workforce. The staff of the software company remained steady throughout the fiscal year 2025, which concluded in June. It was 228,000, but several rounds of layoffs reduced that figure by at least 6,000. Microsoft laid off an additional 9,000 employees in July.

According to Nadella on the BG2 podcast, Microsoft is now appropriately prepared to add more employees. However, in my opinion, the additional staff will have far greater leverage than the pre-AI workforce. In 2022, OpenAI, which has a wide-ranging collaboration with Microsoft, unveiled its ChatGPT helper. The 2022 fiscal year saw a 22% increase in Microsoft's workforce.

Microsoft Collaborating Employees’ Skill and AI

According to Nadella, workers will discover new ways to perform their tasks, and the business wants to make sure they can use the GitHub Copilot AI coding helper and Microsoft 365 productivity software's artificial intelligence features. Anthropic and OpenAI AI models are used in those services.

According to him, the process of unlearning and learning will likely take a year or so, after which the headcount rise will occur with maximum leverage. According to Nadella, firms made a similar adjustment decades ago. Inter-office communications would be faxed to various locations to produce forecasts, followed by Excel spreadsheets and emails, he claimed. As per Nadella, AI is currently the foundation of all planning and execution.

Amazon Also Adopting AI

Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate workers this week as it competes with Microsoft to lease cloud infrastructure for AI model execution. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's allowing companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and entirely new ones), according to a memo sent to employees by Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon.

Due to pressure from their US operations and current concerns over US President Donald Trump's proposed rise in H-1B visa fees, which could impact new applicants hoping to work in the US, IT and technology companies worldwide are going through major adjustments.

In addition to worries over the increase in US visa fees, jobs in the industry are apparently in danger of being displaced by artificial intelligence, which some businesses may choose to use instead of depending on human labour to boost production and efficiency.