Microsoft announced on Wednesday that he was going to dismiss some 9,000 posts on a global scale, which is equivalent to 4% of his 228,000 employees. A plan that is part of a desire for savings while the American technological giant invests massively in artificial intelligence infrastructure (AI).
In mid-May, the Redmond group (Washington State) had already unveiled a social plan on around 6000 people. According to several media, Microsoft had already separated from around 2,000 employees since the start of the year before these two sets of positions.
Deployment of AI
Many make the link between this weight loss treatment and the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) within the company, among the most advanced in this area.
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At the end of April, Microsoft’s general manager Satya Nadella had revealed that 20 to 30% of the internal programming code was now written by AI.
Microsoft simply talks about “minimizing duplicates by refining (its) processes, (its) products, (its) procedures and (its) functions”. “We will allow employees to spend more time with useful tasks thanks to the deployment of new technologies and functionalities,” described Microsoft on Wednesday.
Already 10,000 job cuts in 2023
At the beginning of 2023, the company of Redmond (Washington State) had dismissed around 10,000 people, a decision presented as the result of a counter coupling in the acceleration of IT expenses during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, the company had continued to increase its numbers in net, the 228,000 employees of 2024 constituting a record, up 63% compared to the total of 2019, just before the pandemic.
Other technological giants, which also invest in AI, have also carried out job cuts. Meta announced this year that it would dismiss around 5% of “the least efficient” employees, while Google, owned by Alphabet, dismissed thousands of employees during the past year.
Agencies/CABs