Insider Claims Microsoft Saved Half a Billion Dollars by Automating Low-Level Jobs
A Microsoft executive has made a bold — if dubious — claim: that the company has already saved hundreds of millions of dollars as it automates thousands of jobs formerly held by humans.
As Bloomberg reports based on insider sources, Microsoft chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said during a recent employee presentation that the tech giant saved more than $500 million using AI in 2024 — and that’s just at its call centers.
Althoff’s comments came just days after the company announced layoffs of a whopping 9,000 workers, bringing its total number of job cuts this year up to around 15,000. During a separate event this week, Microsoft’s head lawyer, Brad Smith, claimed that boosting productivity was “not a predominant factor” in those job cuts. Given that those remarks came during an event announcing a hefty donation for AI education, however, that seems like a stretch.
During the internal presentation, Althoff boasted that AI is now assisting in sales, customer service, and software engineering — and it’s even being used to communicate with smaller customers. Though the latter use case is still new, the CCO said it has already brought in tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Obviously, there’s no real way for outside observers to determine how much Microsoft, or anyone else, is saving by replacing human labor with AI — and judging by the experiences of some other companies that have been forced to bring back human workers, it doesn’t always go that way.
There are also questions of methodology; because we don’t know what metrics the company uses to determine savings, we can’t say one way or another that the $500 million in savings that Althoff touted isn’t just the combined salaries of the thousands of people the company laid off in 2024.
Still, Microsoft did just announce in its second-quarter earnings report for 2025 that its revenue increased a whopping $7.6 billion, or 12 percent — and that many of those gains are thanks to its various AI endeavors.
With those figures in mind, it’s clear that the cost-benefit analysis going on behind the scenes at Microsoft supports the laying off of human workers en masse as it continues to push ever forward on AI. Whether that’s good business, only time will tell.
