Microsoft to Expand Workforce with Enhanced AI Leverage, Says CEO Satya Nadella
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced plans to expand the company’s employee base once again during a podcast with investor Brad Gerstner that aired on Friday.
The software giant’s workforce remained flat during the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in June, standing at 228,000 employees. This figure reflects multiple rounds of layoffs that reduced the total headcount by at least 6,000. Additionally, in July, Microsoft cut another 9,000 jobs.
“I will say we will grow our headcount, but the way I look at it is, that headcount we grow will grow with a lot more leverage than the headcount we had pre-AI,” Nadella explained on the BG2 podcast.
Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, which introduced the ChatGPT assistant in 2022, plays a key role in this shift. During the 2022 fiscal year, Microsoft’s headcount grew by 22%. However, Nadella emphasized that employees will now approach their roles differently by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows.
The company aims to provide employees access to AI-powered features within Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot coding assistant. These services leverage AI models from both Anthropic and OpenAI.
“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 said.
Drawing parallels to technological shifts of the past, Nadella recalled how corporations adapted decades ago when inter-office memos were circulated by fax, then replaced by email and Excel spreadsheets. “Right now, any planning, any execution, starts with AI. You research with AI, you think with AI, you share with your colleagues and what have you,” he explained.
The push toward AI-driven productivity at Microsoft comes amid major layoffs in the tech industry. This week, Amazon — a key competitor in the race to provide cloud infrastructure for AI models — announced it was cutting 14,000 corporate jobs. Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, remarked in an internal memo that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”
On the podcast, Nadella also shared an example of a Microsoft executive managing networking fiber who adapted to hiring constraints by building AI agents to handle maintenance tasks. “That is an example of you, to your point, a team with AI tools being able to get more productivity,” he told Gerstner, who is the founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.
Most recently, Microsoft reported a 12% year-over-year revenue growth and posted its widest operating margin since 2002, signaling strong financial performance amid the ongoing transformation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/01/microsoft-ceo-headcount-leverage-ai.html