“Joyless and Demoralising”: Microsoft Workers’ Open Letter Hits Out at AI Push as 60,000 Staff Get Buyout Offers
Current and former employees say AI is being forced into nearly every job with little training. Eligible staff in India, the US, UK and Canada have until 9 December to decide on the exit offer.
An open letter circulating among current and former Microsoft employees accuses the company of chasing artificial intelligence at the cost of its own people, its customers and its climate promises. The letter has drawn fresh attention because it comes just as Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 staff, more than a quarter of its workforce.
What the letter says
Signed by a group calling itself “concerned Microsoft workers”, the letter says that for many staff, working at the company has turned joyless and demoralising. It ties the slide in morale to the period in which Microsoft ramped up its AI spending, and points to heavy workloads, repeated reorganisations and the fear of being replaced by AI.
According to the signatories, employees are pushed to use AI tools in almost every part of their work, often with little training and with speed offered as the only reason. They describe a costly loop of learning new tools, cleaning up poor AI output and rolling back features that do not work well.
The complaints go beyond the office. The letter claims Microsoft’s own research shows AI agents do not put user safety first, and objects to secretive data centre projects, contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli military, and what it calls circular investments among a few AI firms.
Three demands
The letter sorts its demands under three heads: no AI without worker input and protections, no AI without community protections, and no trading away environmental promises for AI. It wants Microsoft to recommit to being carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030, to involve staff in decisions on how AI is built and used, and to stop linking AI use to rewards or reprimands. Membership is open to full-time staff, employees of subsidiaries such as GitHub and LinkedIn, vendors, interns and contractors.
The buyout offer, including India
The Voluntary Exit Offer covers eligible employees at level 70 and below in participating teams in India, the US, the UK and Canada; sales and some engineering teams are excluded. Those who accept get at least eight weeks of base pay, rising with level and tenure. They must decide by 9 December and would leave on 31 December. Chief people officer Amy Coleman has described it as a new choice that lets employees move on now with support, and the company expects fewer than 5% of those eligible to accept.
It is Microsoft’s second buyout programme of 2026. In April, about 8,600 long-serving US employees were offered early retirement, and in July the company cut about 4,800 jobs. Headcount stood at 223,000 in June.
Record profits, thin raises
The timing has raised eyebrows internally. Two days after announcing the buyouts, Microsoft reported quarterly profit of $36.6 billion, up 32%, on revenue of $92.3 billion, while capital spending, mostly on data centres, rose 30% to $45.2 billion. Employees quoted in a New York Times report said merit raises this year were unusually small, in some cases below 1%. Coleman has said the buyouts are not tied to how AI is changing work, though she has not ruled out future layoffs.
Featured image: Microsoft hyderabad.jpg by Cephas 405 at English Wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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