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In a rather tone deaf statement, Microsoft has gloated about a majorly profitable quarter and spike in AI productivity, despite having cut roughly 9,000 staff last week in an effort to reduce spending.
Only a week after it announced thousands of staff cuts, Microsoft is now boasting about the savings it has made using AI.
Company chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said that AI has led to major productivity increases in sales, software engineering and customer service and saved $500 million last year in its call centre alone, thanks to AI.
Microsoft’s efforts not to run AI in the faces of their thousands of now-terminated staff have been poor. Xbox Game Studio’s producer Matt Turnbull said in a now-deleted post on LinkedIn that ex-staff who feel “overwhelmed” by the layoffs should look to AI tools to help get through the tough time, using them to build résumés, apply for new roles, and more.
“I know these types of tools engender strong feelings in people, but I’d be remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances,” he said.
“I’ve been experimenting with ways to use LLM AI tools (like ChatGPT or Copilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss,” he added. It is worth noting that Copilot is a Microsoft product, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, is owned in part by Microsoft, which is a 49 per cent shareholder.
Turnbull went as far as to give example prompts to “help” the cut staff with their future job search.
Microsoft’s brutal cuts come at a time when it is continuing to invest heavily in AI. It said in January that it projected an US$80 billion AI data centre spend for the 2025 fiscal year and announced a US$400 million investment in AI in Switzerland in June.
Its investment in AI is delivering results. The company’s Azure Cloud AI is reportedly set to deliver 33 per cent annual growth through 2028, up from a 27 per cent estimate. This could lead to US$200 billion in revenue.
By 2032, fourteen to 16 per cent of all technology spending will be on generative AI, equating to US$1.8 trillion, according to intelligence analysts at Bloomberg.
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