60,000 Exit Offers and a $36.6 Billion Profit: What Microsoft Is Telling Us About Work

On Monday, October 26, 2026, an email from Microsoft's Chief People Officer, Amy Coleman, reached employees across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India. It offered a Voluntary Exit Offer to roughly 60,000 people, about 27 percent of a workforce of 223,000.

Two days later, Microsoft announced its quarterly results. Revenue: $92.3 billion, up 19 percent. Net profit: $36.6 billion, up 32 percent. It was the company's tenth record revenue quarter in a row.

Put those two facts together and the shape of the future starts to appear.

Even the Humans in Human Resources

Yesterday I spoke with a friend, a consultant at one of the world's leading HR firms. I asked him how AI was affecting recruitment. His answer was blunt. Companies are hiring in far smaller numbers, and his own firm's business has taken the hit.

Think about that. Human Resources has the word "human" in its name, and even it is not immune.

The data backs him up. In its August 2026 update, Stanford's Digital Economy Lab found that employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed jobs was 19 percent below their peers in less exposed roles, up from 13 percent a year earlier. Not mass firings. Fewer hires. The door is not slamming shut. It is quietly not opening.

Record Profits, Record Pay, Fewer Desks

Here is the uncomfortable pattern across Big Tech.

Microsoft: $133.7 billion in net income for fiscal 2026, followed by 4,800 job cuts in July and now exit offers to 60,000.

Meta: record quarterly revenue of $56.31 billion and $26.8 billion in profit in early 2026, followed by 8,000 job cuts starting May 20, about 10 percent of its staff.

Amazon: 16,000 corporate roles cut in January 2026, on top of 14,000 in October 2025.

Closer home, TCS announced in July 2025 that it would cut 12,261 roles, mostly in middle and senior grades, in the same month it reported a quarterly profit of Rs 12,760 crore.

Satya Nadella's pay hit a record $96.5 million in fiscal 2025, his highest since becoming CEO, and stood at $90.6 million in fiscal 2026. Microsoft's CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio is 421 to 1.

The equation is simple:

Record profits + record AI spending ($45.2 billion in a single quarter at Microsoft) = payroll becomes the cost to cut

These are not companies in trouble trimming fat. They are companies in excellent health choosing data centres over desks.

The Plateau Nobody Is Talking About

My view, and it is a view rather than a certainty, is that AI is approaching a plateau. Improvements will keep coming, but the giant leaps we saw between 2023 and 2025 may not repeat.

Technology has done this before. A Boeing 787 today cruises at roughly the same speed as a Boeing 707 did in 1958. Processor clock speeds stalled at around 3 to 4 GHz in the mid-2000s. Cars, internet and smartphones each sprinted, then settled into small yearly gains.

But a plateau in capability does not mean a pause in job losses. In fact, it may mean the opposite.

Why the Hardest Year May Be 2027

Job losses lag behind technology. Here is the cycle as I see it.

Stage 1: The tool arrives. Companies hire people to figure out how to use it.

Stage 2: Those people redesign workflows, automate steps and optimise systems around it.

Stage 3: The optimised system runs on its own. Many of the people who built it are no longer needed.

Today, many professionals are in Stage 2, doing the streamlining themselves. When that work is finished, a fresh wave of exits follows. My expectation is that 2027 will be the toughest year, before things begin to improve and different kinds of jobs return.

The Founders' Decade

Here is where the story turns.

Americans filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses in 2025, the most in two decades of government tracking, and 2026 is on pace to beat it. Solo founders made up 63 percent of new companies formed through Stripe Atlas in the second quarter of 2026, an all-time high. AI is not only removing jobs. It is lowering the cost of starting something of your own.

New roles will emerge too: people who design and supervise AI agents, audit their decisions, and translate between machines and customers.

Salaries may plateau. Some people will choose to work less. Employers may find it easier to hire a highly skilled person for less than that person would have earned in 2024. A hard adjustment for anyone counting on steady annual hikes.

For a 16 year old, though, the lesson is clear. The safest career is no longer a job title. It is the ability to understand AI systems, build with them, and communicate ideas well enough to lead others. The students who learn to build will have options, and many will create jobs instead of hunting for them.

How Futurowise Can Help

At Futurowise, our Foundations of Agentic AI programme teaches students in Grades 9 to 12 how AI agents actually work, and how to design, build and test one of their own. As companies rebuild work around AI, the students who can build these systems will be the ones shaping what comes next, not waiting to be replaced by it.

The next cohort starts December 24.

Learn more about the programme: https://www.futurowise.com/programs/agentic-ai