Microsoft plans to hire more but with ‘a lot more leverage’ thanks to AI, CEO Satya Nadella says
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the company at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on April 4, 2025. Microsoft Corp., determined to hold its ground in artificial intelligence, will soon let consumers tailor the Copilot digital assistant to their own needs.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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%
Technology
China’s Baidu says it’s running 250,000 robotaxis a week — same as Alphabet’s Waymo did this spring
Chinese tech company Baidu announced Monday it can sell some robotaxi rides without any human staff in the vehicles.
Baidu
BEIJING — As Baidu ramps up its robotaxi operations worldwide, fully driverless weekly rides as of Oct. 31 have now surpassed 250,000 orders, according to a spokesperson for the company’s driverless car unit Apollo Go.
That’s on par with what Waymo reported in late April for its weekly paid U.S. rides. When contacted by CNBC, Waymo did not have a new specific figure to share. The Alphabet-backed robotaxi operator primarily operates in San Francisco and Los Angeles in California and Phoenix, Arizona. Waymo partners with Uber in Austin and Atlanta.
The ramp up in Baidu’s robotaxi capabilities comes as Chinese and U.S. companies have been competing for leadership in advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, electric cars and autonomous driving.
It was not clear for how long Apollo Go has been operating 250,000 rides a week. For the quarter ended June 30, the company averaged about 169,000 rides a week based on CNBC calculations of the 2.2 million fully driverless robotaxi rides disclosed for the period.
Baidu’s Apollo Go primarily operates robotaxis in Wuhan and parts of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in mainland China. The company is also expanding to Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and, most recently, Switzerland. Robotaxis typically must undergo phases of public testing before local regulators allow companies to charge fares.
Apollo Go said it has received 17 million robotaxi ride orders to date, and that its cars have driven 240 million kilometers (149 miles), with 140 million fully driverless rides.
On safety, Apollo Go disclosed on average there has been one airbag deployment incident for every 10.1 million kilometers driven, but so far there’s has not been any major accident involving human injury or death.
Baidu is scheduled to next release its quarterly results on Nov. 18 before U.S. market open. The company is set to hold its annual tech conference in Beijing on Nov. 13.
Weekly robotaxi figures from Chinese rivals Pony.ai and WeRide were not immediately available. Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for an update to the figures shared in April.
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