Microsoft is spending heavily on data centres, chips and other infrastructure to meet demand for AI. It is also moving to reduce its workforce by around 60,000 people, and has begun offering voluntary exit to staff in specific roles in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and India.
The terms
As of June, Microsoft had roughly 223,000 full-time employees worldwide. On that basis about a quarter of the company could fall inside the programme.
The offer goes to employees at level 70 and below. Those who accept are expected to receive three months’ pay in advance, plus an amount equivalent to one month’s base salary for each year of service.
Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice-president and chief people officer, told staff in a message on Monday that the voluntary exit offer is an important part of the company’s strategy for adapting to change, giving employees more flexibility and, where possible, the chance to choose the next chapter of their careers for themselves.
Why cut while investing?
There is investor concern about whether the expected revenue will actually arrive to match Microsoft’s enormous AI spending. So the company is trying to reduce costs and rearrange its workforce to keep pace with AI’s rapid expansion.
What remains genuinely unclear — and Prothom Alo says so plainly, which is the honest position — is whether Microsoft is cutting headcount because AI has raised productivity, or to absorb the cost of its own AI infrastructure investment.
Those two explanations point in opposite directions. The first says the work still needs doing and fewer people can now do it. The second says the work still needs the same number of people, but the money has been committed to buildings and chips instead. Only the first is a story about AI replacing labour; the second is a story about capital allocation that happens to be denominated in jobs.
Microsoft has not said which it is, and the pattern of its other decisions does not settle it either. This month it cancelled its involvement in the biggest AI data centre planned for Britain — a company both committing and withdrawing at the scale of tens of billions is not following a single simple plan.
This is the second round, and the first one worked
Earlier this year Microsoft offered voluntary exit to about 9,000 employees in the United States. More than 30 per cent of those offered took it. Microsoft says the new offer was designed on the basis of what it learned from that programme.
That acceptance rate is the number to hold on to. If 30 per cent again accept out of 60,000, around 18,000 people leave without a single redundancy notice being issued — a restructuring of real size, achieved without the legal process, consultation requirements or headlines that compulsory cuts attract.
In July the company said it would lay off about 4,800 staff, roughly 2.1 per cent of its global headcount. At the same time it announced a restructuring of the Xbox gaming business and plans to sell five game studios.
What to take from it here
Two things, for anyone working in or hiring for this industry in Bangladesh.
First, a voluntary exit offer is not a neutral gift. It is most attractive to the people with the best outside options, which means the staff a company would least like to lose are the likeliest to take it. Companies that run these schemes repeatedly tend to discover this.
Second, the capital-versus-labour question is not unique to Microsoft. Every large technology company is now committing sums to AI infrastructure that have to be found somewhere in the accounts, and Anthropic’s listing filing put the scale of that spending on the record yesterday. When a firm says AI has made it more efficient, the fair follow-up question is whether the efficiency is in the work or in the wage bill.
Other large technology companies worldwide are spending at a similar scale on AI infrastructure.
