Microsoft made more than $500 million in savings last year by using AI across key business functions, a senior executive has revealed.
According to reports from Bloomberg, Microsoft’s chief commercial officer, Judson Althoff, made the admission during a presentation this week.
Althoff revealed the tech giant has been using AI to drive productivity improvements in areas such as software engineering, customer service, and sales.
Notably, the huge savings unlocked by Microsoft were made primarily in its call centers. Exact details on savings across other business functions are unknown.
A source told Bloomberg that using AI tools has enabled the company to improve employee productivity alongside customer satisfaction – with the technology used specifically for handling interactions with smaller customers.
In sales, meanwhile, the technology is also proving highly beneficial in terms of productivity. Althoff noted that the technology is making sales people more effective.
Staff in this business segment are using the company’s Copilot AI assistant, the source told Bloomberg. This is helping staff find leads, close deals quicker, and boosting revenue generation by around 9%.
Not a good week for Microsoft PR
The comments from Althoff come just days after Microsoft announced a fresh batch of layoffs which are expected to impact around 9,000 staff globally.
This latest round follows several so far this year, including another round just two months ago impacting 6,000 staff.
Staff at the company’s Redmond headquarters bore the brunt of the layoffs in May, with software engineers in particular affected.
The latest round of workforce cuts were also mired in controversy after a senior figure at the company’s Xbox division - which saw staff laid off - offered advice some criticized as poorly-timed.
In a LinkedIn post, Matt Turnbull, an executive producer at Xbox Game Studios, advised staff to use AI to reduce the “emotional and cognitive load” that comes with job losses.
AI is finally delivering benefits, but not how you think
The latest admission from the tech giant comes amid a period of growing concerns over the impact of generative AI on the labor market.
In recent months, researchers have warned that the technology could seriously impact entry-level roles across a range of industries. For tech workers specifically, the increased adoption of AI has some alarm bells ringing - and these concerns could be warranted.
Salesforce, for example, recently announced that 30% of internal work is being handled by AI.
Since last year, the CRM giant has been pushing its own agentic AI service, dubbed ‘Agentforce’, which allows enterprise customers to deploy automated agents capable of carrying out tasks previously reserved for human workers.
Customer service and contact center roles in particular are in the crosshairs as a result of agentic AI, recent studies have shown, while other areas like human resources and even software development have been touted.
In a podcast appearance in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will be carrying out the work of mid-level engineers within the next year or so.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also hinted at the prospect of not hiring new software engineers as a result of its own internal success with agentic AI on this front.
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