NEW YORK (AWP/AFP) – Microsoft will dismiss several thousand additional people after a first wave in May, the group told AFP on Wednesday, in particular by reducing certain hierarchical levels.
“The total impact represents less than 4% of the workforce”, according to a spokesperson, or up to around 9,000 employees, based on a total workforce of 228,000 people according to the last annual report.
“We continue to make organizational changes necessary for the favorable positioning of the company and its teams in an evolving market context,” said the spokesperson.
In mid-May, the Redmond group (Washington State) had already unveiled a social plan on “less than 3%” of staff, or around 6,000 people.
“We gain in agility by reducing the” hierarchical ladder, said Microsoft who, according to several media, had already separated from around 2,000 employees since the start of the year before these two sets of posts.
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.
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.
Asked about the impact of artificial intelligence on its workforce, the group did not follow up immediately.
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.
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.
AFP/Al
