According to Associated Press, Microsoft is offering buyouts to 27% of its global workforce or 60,000 employees in what is being called as a Voluntary Exit Offer.
Reuters reports Chief People Officer Amy Coleman sent a memo to the software giant's employees saying that "this offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support."
The company is investing somewhere between $150 and $175 billion dollars on AI in 2026 and that number is expected to increase in the years to come.
Robert Maginnis, author of "AI for Mankind's Future," says Microsoft has to reallocate its resources.
"All the savings is going to go to AI data centers. Others are going to do the same thing. You know, the money that once paid salaries is now going to machines," Maginnis states.
J.P. Morgan Global Research projected worldwide and industrywide AI capital spending could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.
"It's not just Microsoft. We've seen across the U.S. a significant uptick in the number of people that are losing their jobs or not getting jobs," Maginnis says.
The world is about to change in a major way, he says, but this has been seen before.
"What happened in the Industrial Revolution, people left the farm and went to the factory. We went through a metamorphosis again when we got electricity — the Internet more recently. We just have to adjust," Maginnis states.
In the past, conventional wisdom was to tell your kids and grandkids to get into computer programming. However, he says not anymore as that's one of the first industries to metamorphize. Medicine, the law, education, banking and factory work are also all facing massive changes.
So, what's the advice now?
"It's going to be quite a while before AI is installed in a robot and it comes to your house to repair your plumbing. Some of the blue-collar jobs, I think, are pretty safe," Maginnis says.
