Microsoft will expand its employee base once again, CEO Satya Nadella told investor Brad Gerstner on a podcast that aired on Friday.

The software maker's workforce didn't budge in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in June. It stood at 228,000, with multiple rounds of layoffs lowering the total number by at least 6,000 . In July, Microsoft let go of another 9,000 workers .

"I will say we will grow our headcount, but the way I look at it is, that headcount we grow will grow with a lot more leverage than the headcount we had pre-AI," Nadella said on the BG2 podcast . OpenAI, which has a broad partnership with Microsoft, introduced its ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft's headcount grew by 22% in the 2022 fiscal year.

Employees will figure out how to do their jobs differen

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