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60,000 People, One Email
Monday, Microsoft sent an email to roughly 60,000 employees.
It offered them money to go.
Hereโs what happened.
The โVoluntary Exit Offerโ covers staff in the US, Canada, India and the UK at level 70 and below.
Thatโs everyone up to vice president.
Around 60,000 people are eligible, about 27% of Microsoftโs 223,000 employees.
The package looks like standard severance plus career planning help.
Some data centre, sales and marketing teams are excluded.
Translation: the people building the AI infrastructure stay.
The people selling it stay.
Everyone else got a price. ๐ณ
Hereโs why this one matters more than a normal layoff.
Itโs the second round this year.
In April Microsoft ran its first-ever voluntary retirement programme for about 8,750 people.
More than 30% of them took it.
Six months later the offer went to seven times as many people.
Microsoftโs chief people officer, Amy Coleman, framed it as giving employees more ways to shape their next chapter.
Microsoftโs own reporting framed it as balancing the AI build-out with capital efficiency.
Think about that.
Headcount has been flat since 2022 while the AI spend went vertical.
Last week Anthropicโs filing showed $6.6 million of revenue per employee.
Microsoft is the company that has to match that with 223,000 people on the payroll.
So, itโs reducing the denominator. ๐
Speaking of timing...
Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta all report earnings tonight, after the close.
The buyout landed 48 hours before the numbers.
Thatโs not an accident.
Let me explain what this means for you.
Microsoft sells Copilot to every office on earth with the pitch โdo more with the people you have.โ
This week it applied that pitch to itself.
If the vendor is cutting a quarter of its own staff, the question for your business is which quarter of your work survives.
The answer is the work thatโs already been turned into a repeatable system.
The people who stay are the ones who did that.
So, hereโs a free starter kit for turning one task you already do into a reusable AI skill: capture it, write it, test it, keep a human on the final sign-off.
Build one this week.
The email Microsoft sent on Monday is coming to every industry.
The people with a documented skill get the โstayโ version. ๐
Did You Know?
In July 2014 Microsoft announced 18,000 job cuts, the biggest in its history at the time.
Most of them were Nokia phone staff it had bought three months earlier.
Satya Nadella was five months into the job.
Twelve years later, the biggest cut on his watch isnโt a cut at all.
Itโs an invitation. ๐
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Drop your URL. Get your score in about 10 minutes.
๐๏ธ The Tip AI News ๐๏ธ
Apple quietly shipped an AI assistant for Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
Then it pulled the apps from the App Store within hours.
Then it put them back.
Hereโs what the โIntelligent Assistantโ does.
In Pages it writes and edits documents from a prompt.
In Keynote it builds slides and edits images inside the deck.
In Numbers it writes complex formulas, builds tables, suggests charts and finds patterns in existing data.
The catch is the price tag.
Itโs in beta for Apple Creator Studio subscribers only, at $12.99 a month or $129 a year.
US English only.
The apps themselves stay free for ordinary editing.
Hereโs why itโs interesting.
Apple has had Siri AI on iOS 27 for months.
This assistant is separate, sits inside the document, and is aimed squarely at Gemini inside Google Workspace.
Apple accidentally published the release notes.
Macworld spotted them.
The apps vanished from the US App Store for a day.
So the same week Microsoft cut staff to pay for AI, Apple added a $12.99 line item so you can pay for it too. ๐ฐ
๐Meme of the Day
Over to You...
Pick one task you did three times this month and write down the steps before Friday.
That document is the difference between being the 60,000 and being the people who sent the email. ๐ฅ
Founder,ย AI Persona Method | TheTip.ai
Get paid to solve problems like this โ AI Certified Consultant
PS.Tomorrow Metaโs new business terms go live. Last chance to look at which websites are linked to your Facebook page before the crawler stops asking.
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Jeff J Hunter, 3220 W Monte Vista Ave #105, Turlock,
CA 95380, United States
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