CEO Satya Nadella says Microsoft will expand hiring, but with “leverage” from AI
CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, during a conversation with investor Brad Gerstner on the BG2 podcast said that they will be increasing their headcount, but at present they will increase the headcount will grow with much "more leverage" than the headcount they had before AI.
New Delhi: Microsoft will be expanding their employee base eventually, noted CEO Satya Nadella to investor Brad Gerstner on the BG2 podcast. The software maker’s workforce didn’t move in the 2025 fiscal year that ended in June. It stood at 228,000, with many rounds of layoffs that lowered the total number by around 6,000. In July, Microsoft released another 9,000 workers as well.
Nadella said that they will be increasing their headcount, but at present they will increase the headcount will grow with much "more leverage” than the headcount they had before AI. OpenAI, which has a broad partnership with Microsoft, unveiled the ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft’s headcount increased by 22 per cent in the 2022 fiscal year.
Nadella felt that the employees would figure out ways to do their jobs a little differently and felt that the company would like to ensure they have access to AI features in Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant. These take on AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Nadella said, "It’s the unlearning and learning process that I think will take the next year or so, then the headcount growth will come with max leverage”.
Nadella compared the adjustment to the ones in corporate decades ago, going from face to email and Excel spreadsheets. He furthered that every planning these days starts with AI, and even research happens through that.
Just this week, Amazon, which are racing against Microsoft to rent out cloud infrastructure for running AI models, let go of 14,000 corporate employees. Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and tech, said to workers in a memo that this generation of AI is quite "transformative technology” being witnessed since the internet and has aided companies to innovate quicker than before.
In the podcast, Nadella gave an example of a Microsoft executive who deals with networking fibre. When the company ramped up data centre operations in order to match the rising cloud demand, the executive understood that hiring all the people required wouldn’t be possible and instead built AI agents to handle maintenance.
This Nadella noted was an example of how a team with an AI tool is able to have more productivity, during his conversation with Gerstner, who is the founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.