Last year was a bloodbath when it came to layoffs from big tech companies, and so far, 2025 isn’t faring much better.
The big message this year is that artificial intelligence will replace countless jobs across many key sectors, especially white-collar jobs.
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed this on June 18, saying that as the company rolls out more generative AI and agents, it should “change the way our work is done.”
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he said. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Related: Disney makes a devastating layoff announcement
Amazon is not the only big tech company to announce that layoffs are on the way. Meta did the same on February 10, eliminating 5% of staff based on performance.
Google made a similar move on June 10, but instead offered buyouts to employees across many of its teams, including Communications, Marketing, Research, Core, and Knowledge & Information.
Now Microsoft is next, and if what’s suggested comes to pass, it will be the tech company’s third round of cuts this year.
People walking by the Microsoft building as turmoil brews inside.
Image source: Fruchtman/Getty Images
Microsoft is planning to cut thousands
Sales is the next section of Microsoft to be gutted, as the tech company plans to slash thousands of jobs, according to new reporting from Bloomberg.
The cuts will be formalized in early July, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity, and will also affect employees outside of sales teams.
The timing of the cuts could also change, the source told Bloomberg.
If executed, this will be Microsoft’s fourth round of layoffs in 2025. The first came in early January, when Microsoft cut less than 1% of its total employees, affecting less than 2,300 roles. These layoffs were attributed to performance-related issues.
Related: Google delivers a harsh message to loyal employees
Round two came four months later in May, when the company announced a larger global workforce reduction. This time, 3% of employees were affected globally, or 6,000 people, with a heavy emphasis on software developers.
Then in early June, Microsoft made another snip to Redmond, Wash., headquarters staff as part of its ongoing restructuring plan.
Related: What are layoffs & how do they work? Everything you need to know
Microsoft’s commitment to AI
Microsoft said earlier in the year that it would invest $80 billion in AI-related infrastructure to build AI-enabled data centers, which will be used both to train AI models and to deploy cloud and AI-based applications.
While Microsoft has not publicly stated that it intends to replace human jobs with AI, some reports say that terminated employees were tasked to use AI tools or had AI in their job titles.
In Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index report released in April, the company said that one in three business leaders say that they are considering layoffs as a result of AI deployment in their companies. In other words, they may not have said it directly, but one might reasonably assume what’s coming next.
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