Microsoft will expand its employee base once again, CEO Satya Nadella told investor Brad Gerstner on a podcast that aired on Friday.

The software maker’s workforce didn’t budge in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in June. It stood at 228,000, with multiple rounds of layoffs lowering the total number by at least 6,000. In July, Microsoft let go of another 9,000 workers.

“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 said on the BG2 podcast. OpenAI, which has a broad partnership with Microsoft, introduced its ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft’s headcount grew by 22% in the 2022 fiscal year.

Employees will figure out how to do their jobs differently, Nadella said, adding that the company wants to ensure they can access artificial intelligence features in Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant. Those services draw on AI models from 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,” he said.

A similar adjustment played out at corporations decades ago, Nadella said. To prepare forecasts, inter-office memos would circulate across multiple sites by fax, and then came email and Excel spreadsheets, he said.

“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,” Nadella said.

This week, Amazon, which is racing against Microsoft to rent out cloud infrastructure for running AI models, cut 14,000 corporate employees.

Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, told workers in a 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 talked about a Microsoft executive who deals with networking fiber. As the company ramped up data center operations to meet rising cloud demand, the executive realized she wouldn’t be able to hire all the people she thought she needed, and so she built AI agents to handle maintenance, Nadella said.

“That is an example of you, to your point, a team with AI tools being able to get more productivity,” Nadella told Gerstner, who is founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.

On Wednesday, Microsoft reported 12% year-over-year revenue growth and showed the widest operating margin since 2002.

WATCH: Microsoft earnings beat estimates, Azure revenue jumps 40%

Bob Hartheimer, CEO of Tennessee’s Evolve Bank & Trust, was fired after U.S. law enforcement officials caught him propositioning a law enforcement officer posing as a 15-year-old boy on gay dating app Grindr.

On Oct. 19, an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation logged onto Grindr while pretending to be a teen boy, and a user called “Tomm” wrote a message to that person saying, “Hey any chance u would hu with an older and chill guy,” according to an affidavit from a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was unsealed on Tuesday.

The two discussed getting together in person later in the week, according to the affidavit. On Snapchat, they talked about the sex acts they might perform. “Tomm” asked for a photo of the “boy” without shorts on, and he also sent the undercover agent a picture of himself naked. The FBI was able to obtain an IP address for “Tomm” from Snapchat, as well as an address from Comcast, the affidavit showed.

Hartheimer was arrested in Memphis on Oct. 23 for attempted production of child pornography and transfer of obscene material to a minor, according to a warrant.

Blake Ballin, a lawyer representing Hartheimer, told CNBC on Saturday that Evolve has fired the CEO.

“Bob’s family is aware of the charges,” Ballin wrote in an email. “His family loves and supports him and requests privacy during this difficult period in their lives. We have no further comment at this time.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on Hartheimer’s firing from Evolve Bank on Friday. The bank did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

Last year, Evolve was caught up in the bankruptcy of financial technology startup Synapse, which cut off access to a system for handling transactions and account details. Fintech apps such as Yotta worked with Evolve and other banks, with Synapse acting as a middleman.

Synapse’s method of keeping app users’ money in various banks, including Evolve, created accounting problems, and up to $96 million in deposits went missing. Thousands of Americans lost money, CNBC reported.

In 2024, Evolve also suffered a cyberattack, during which hackers obtained customer information and demanded a ransom. The bank said it did not pay any ransom and the data was eventually posted online.

In August, Evolve, founded in 1925, named Hartheimer to replace CEO Scott Stafford, who retired after joining the bank in 2004.

“This is a structural change, demonstrating our continued commitment to doing the hard work to earn back the trust of our customers, employees, regulators, and investors,” Evolve said.

When he was hired, the bank touted Hartheimer’s experience as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Division of Resolutions, as well as his years as a regulatory consultant for fintech companies.

“Over the past four decades, I’ve led, turned around, and advised institutions across the financial landscape,” Hartheimer wrote on his LinkedIn profile. 

The bank reported net losses for each of the first three quarters of 2025 after being profitable since 2003, according to data on file with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan and Hugh Son contributed reporting.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.

Netherlands-based chipmaker Nexperia is at the heart of a standoff between the European Union, the U.S. and China that has triggered a near-crisis for global automakers.

The Dutch government seized control of Nexperia, owned by the Chinese company Wingtech, in October, citing national security concerns. The move prompted Beijing to block Nexperia products from leaving China.

Meetings are underway in Europe Saturday to attempt to defuse the escalating issue, and Chinese and U.S. authorities appear to be opening up a pathway for Nexperia’s China-based operations to resume exporting critical automotive chips.

Spokespeople for the White House and Nexperia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For now, however, the auto industry’s supply chain still hangs in the balance.

The dispute is threatening vehicle production worldwide as automakers warn of looming shortages of the chipmaker’s components, which are critical to basic electrical functions in cars and challenging to replace on short notice.

The battle has unfolded amid heightened scrutiny of Chinese-linked tech firms from Western governments, including the U.S., which recently tightened export-control rules to limit technology transfers to Chinese-owned entities.

Nexperia’s owner, Wingtech, was put on a U.S. blacklist in December 2024 for its alleged role “in aiding China’s government’s efforts to acquire entities with sensitive semiconductor manufacturing capability.”

Here’s what to know about where the dispute stands, and why it matters. 

In late October, automakers, such as Volkswagen, Nissan Motor and Mercedes-Benz, sounded the alarm about potential production cuts if Nexperia’s chip exports are curtailed for long.

While automakers typically have some stockpiles and alternative suppliers, it is difficult to switch supply sources overnight. 

On Friday, reports said the U.S. plans to announce that Nexperia will resume sending chips under a framework agreement reached during talks between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, citing sources familiar with the matter. And on Saturday, China said it will exempt some Nexperia chips from its export ban. Chinese officials did not specify what those exemptions could entail.

“We will comprehensively consider the actual situation of the enterprise and exempt eligible exports,” The Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement. 

If finalized, the exemptions could ease immediate pressure on automakers. But the broader dispute over ownership, technology control and security oversight remains unresolved.