Almost 100 Microsoft Australia jobs at risk as part of global redundancies

The tech giant has laid off almost 3 per cent of its global workforce overnight in a bid to further slim its operations as it spends big on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft has laid off almost 3 per cent of its global workforce. Picture: Gerard Julien/AFP

Almost 100 Microsoft Australia jobs potentially face the axe as part of a global redundancy round and the tech behemoth deepens its push into artificial intelligence.

The Seattle-based company, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in April, said on Wednesday it would cut about 3 per cent of its workforce. Although it did not reveal exact numbers, this equates to about 6000 jobs.

Microsoft employs about 228,000 people, about 55 per cent of whom work in the US. Across its Australian and New Zealand operations it employs more than 3000.

A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to say how many jobs will be cut locally. Generally during layoffs at global companies, each region must cut their workforce by the headline figure.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the redundancies would also hit its LinkedIn operations and would be felt across levels and teams.

“We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace” she said.

It is understood the axings will not be performance-based, with the aim being a slimming down of operations as the business increasingly focuses on the development of AI capabilities, such as its flagship Copilot chatbot and its reported $US13bn investment in ChatGTP creator OpenAI.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella. Picture: Jeff Chiu/AP

The spokeswoman also said the company would be streamlining itself by having fewer managers and having staff do more meaningful work through the use of new tech.

But Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said concerns over AI replacing jobs were overblown, saying retraining and upskilling workforces was inevitable.

“I think that’s one thing that we should just remind ourselves,” he said. “As opposed to not being callous about it and not being clear eyed about any displacement, what does it mean to skill and re-skill, especially mid-career, so you are equipped for jobs of the future,” Mr Nadella said in March.It is the biggest round of layoffs at Microsoft since it cut 10,000 people from its workforce in 2023. Overall, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Netflix and others having sacked more than 70,000 people combined since late 2022 after embarking on recruiting binges, sparking wild share price swings.

Early last year eBay sacked almost one in 10 people across its global operations – via Zoom – saying its “overall headcount and expenses has outpaced the growth” of its business.

WiseTech founder Richard White has previously said the layoffs were the result of paying “silly” wages during the pandemic - which his company has refused to do, avoiding what he described as the “big death dive”.

“When wages went nuts — and tech wages were at the extremes of this, they were the real outliers in terms of inflation — we just passively went ‘OK, we are not going to participate in that. We’re not going to pay silly prices’. We are just going to be as good as we can possibly be,” Mr White said last August.

“And … the small number of staff that left us for much higher wages — all but one of them have come back because they all lost their jobs at the end of the cycle. So there is a real lesson here about consistency of employment versus the big sugar hit and then the big death dive.”

Microsoft shares were slightly lower in trading overnight, closing at $US449.14.

The move comes after some high-profile local poachings, with Telstra last week nabbing Microsoft’s Australia and New Zealand boss Steven Worral to helm its Infraco business which operates the telco’s data centres, towers and its $1.6bn intercity fibre network.

Goodman Group in April landed Microsoft’s former US-based data centre boss Kraig Knight to help expand its own data centre aspirations.

In its April results, Microsoft beat analyst expectations by posting $US25.8bn in income for the quarter and juicing its full-year forecast.

Originally published as Almost 100 Microsoft Australia jobs at risk as part of global redundancies