(The Center Square) – Microsoft announced a new voluntary buyout program for employees Monday, as the company continues to downsize and reprioritize towards artificial intelligence.
In a short blog post Monday, Microsoft Executive Vice President Amy Coleman announced the email that had been shared with employees earlier in the morning.
“Today, we’re introducing a new Voluntary Exit Offer to eligible employees within participating organizations,” Coleman wrote. “This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support. It also gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs.”
“The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we’re evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter. This builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program,” she wrote.
That retirement program, as well as a round of layoffs in July, reduced the number of employees at Microsoft and its affiliates such as Xbox by thousands of employees, and continued to reverse the trend that followed the COVID pandemic, which saw hiring balloon at tech companies across the globe.
The latest buyout was offered to around 60,000 employees, or about 27% of the company’s workforce, according to media reports.
During the pandemic, companies including Microsoft overhired workers as operations shifted to remote locations. With the return to office and the rise of AI, many of those same tech giants continue to shed jobs by the thousands.
The employee reductions come as Microsoft continues to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, with profits reportedly up over 30%.
“The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it. At the same time, we’ll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft,” Coleman wrote. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”
Washington state GOP chair Jim Walsh reacted to the buyout program on Monday.
“These unusual employee buy-out offers at Microsoft reflect hard economic realities in our state that reach far beyond just one company,” he said in a text message to The Center Square.