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Microsoft has laid off 800 software engineers as part of a broader workforce reduction, with company executives citing the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in writing and optimising code. The tech giant recently cut 2,000 jobs in its home state of Washington, and 40% of those layoffs amounting to 800 employees were from its software engineering teams.
The move highlights a growing trend in the tech industry, where AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, Microsoft’s AI pair programmer, are being used to automate portions of the coding process. According to internal reports, AI now contributes to up to 30% of Microsoft’s codebase, reducing the need for as many human engineers in certain development roles.
By Gamuchirai Mapako
Speaking during an interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained as compared to a few years back where everyone was encouraged to learn computer sciences, now he wouldn’t advise students to learn programming.
“Everyone in the world is now a programmer, that is the miracle of artificial intelligence,” he said.
Microsoft confirmed the layoffs in a regulatory filing, stating that the cuts were part of an ongoing effort to “align resources with strategic priorities.” While the company did not explicitly blame AI for the job reductions, reports suggest that the rapid adoption of AI coding assistants has made some engineering roles redundant.
GitHub Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s Codex, has been widely adopted within Microsoft and by external developers. The tool suggests entire lines of code, autocompletes functions, and even debugs software capabilities that were once the sole domain of human programmers.
Other major tech firms, including Google, Amazon, and Meta, have also integrated AI coding tools into their workflows, though none have yet announced large-scale layoffs directly tied to AI adoption.
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