Microsoft offers buyouts to more than a quarter of its workforce, 60,000 employees across Xbox Windows and Copilot invited to leave while datacenter and marketing units are excluded, survey of 9,000 executives finds no AI productivity gain yet

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The Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California. Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images theguardian.com

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Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, according to Bloomberg — more than a quarter of its 223,000-strong workforce. Emails were expected to go out this week to staff at vice-president level and below in the United States, Canada, India and Britain, with divisions including Xbox, Windows and Copilot among those eligible. Datacenter, cybersecurity and marketing staff are not.

The company presents the programme as a service to its people. "This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support," Amy Coleman, Microsoft's chief people officer, wrote in a memo. It is the second round this year: in April the company offered voluntary retirement to roughly 7 per cent of its US workforce, then about 125,000 people. Microsoft did not respond to requests for further detail.

The buyouts arrive as the company directs record sums into AI datacenter construction, and the same trade is being made across the sector. Meta announced plans in April to cut 10 per cent of personnel, about 8,000 jobs. Oracle shed nearly 13 per cent of its workforce — 21,000 positions — in June, attributing the reductions to AI. Recent weeks have brought cuts at Amazon's retail arm, American Express, Barclays, eBay and Netflix. What the substitution is supposed to produce remains, by the executives' own account, undocumented: a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 90 per cent of 9,000 surveyed senior executives said AI had not yet resulted in greater productivity at their companies. Some firms, Meta included, have already scaled back their layoff plans.

The eligibility rules draw their own map. The datacenter division, whose headcount exists to build and run the infrastructure, is excluded from the offer. Copilot, the company's flagship AI product line, is eligible.

The buyout benefits match a standard severance package, according to the report. Bloomberg's count of stories mentioning job cuts, layoffs and firings across corporate America jumped on Thursday to its highest level since early May.