For the past year, Microsoft has been going through a tough and quiet phase. Many teams faced layoffs, and thousands of employees lost their jobs as the company tried to reshape itself for a future built around artificial intelligence. Now, after months of uncertainty, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has shared something important and hopeful: the company is ready to start hiring again. But this time, the hiring will not look the same as before. It will be shaped by a new rule—AI will guide everything.

In a conversation with investor Brad Gerstner on his BG2 podcast, Nadella spoke very openly about Microsoft’s next chapter. He explained that the company will slowly increase its employee numbers again, but it will do it in a smarter and more thoughtful way. He wants to make sure that every new job is meaningful, needed, and supported by the power of AI. He said something important that shows how careful and strategic this new growth will be. “We will grow our headcount,” he explained. “But the way I look at it is, that headcount will grow with a lot more leverage than what we had pre-AI.”

In simple words, this means Microsoft is not rushing to hire huge numbers of people. Instead, they plan to hire fewer people but make each person’s work more powerful by giving them strong AI tools. The company wants each job role to be more productive, more creative, and more effective than it would have been in the past.

At the end of its 2025 financial year, Microsoft had about 228,000 employees. This number stayed almost the same throughout the year because the company had laid off more than 15,000 people. Most of these cuts were part of a long-term restructuring plan that aimed to reduce older roles and create space for new AI-connected work. Nadella seems confident that Microsoft is now ready to shift from cutting jobs to adding them again, but not in the old way.

To understand how big this change is, it helps to look back at 2022. Before the huge rise of AI tools like large language models and cloud-based intelligence platforms, Microsoft had grown its hiring by a massive 22 percent. That year felt like a boom period for tech companies, with rapid expansion and big ambitions. But once AI began transforming how companies work—from coding to customer service to cybersecurity—the situation changed. Microsoft realized that the future required deep investment in AI systems, cloud supercomputers, and partnerships with AI research labs rather than simply adding more traditional employees.

This shift slowed hiring heavily, but it also forced Microsoft to rethink the kind of company it wanted to be. Nadella now believes the company is entering a new stage where AI does not replace people, but helps them achieve more than ever before. This idea shows in another key point he made on the podcast: he said the new phase of hiring will focus on roles that are “transformed by AI, not replaced by it.” This means jobs will change, but they will not disappear. Instead, employees will learn how to work with AI tools that support them, speed up their tasks, and allow them to focus on more meaningful parts of their work.

Nadella also talked about something that many people can relate to—the challenge of “unlearning and learning.” Although the sentence in the original news snippet ends abruptly, the idea is clear. We live in a time where technology changes so fast that everyone, including experienced professionals, must constantly learn new skills. Sometimes we even need to forget old habits that no longer work. Microsoft wants its teams to keep improving, updating their knowledge, and growing with the technology around them. This mindset will be very important for the new hiring phase.

The plan that Nadella describes is not about rebuilding Microsoft’s workforce to be larger than ever. Instead, it is about building a smarter workforce where a combination of human talent and artificial intelligence creates faster results and better ideas. Many companies in the world are asking the same question Microsoft faced over the last year: how do we balance technology and people? Nadella seems to believe that the answer is not to choose one over the other, but to make them work together.

This new approach could reshape how teams operate inside the company. For example, a software engineer may not need to write thousands of lines of code manually anymore. Instead, AI tools can generate drafts, check for bugs, and help the engineer focus on design and decision-making. A marketing employee may use AI to organize campaigns, analyze data, and understand customer needs more quickly. Even administrative jobs could become easier and more efficient as AI takes over repetitive tasks.

Still, Nadella’s comments suggest something reassuring: Microsoft is not planning a future without human workers. It is planning a future where humans can do more meaningful tasks, supported by strong AI systems. This gives a message of balance and hope to employees who may have felt uncertain during the layoffs.

The CEO’s words also reflect Microsoft’s responsibility as one of the world’s largest tech companies. By restarting hiring in a careful way and giving employees powerful AI tools, the company may set a model that other global companies will follow. It shows that growth is possible even in a changing world, as long as it is done with planning, understanding, and sensitivity toward both technology and people.

As Microsoft prepares for this new chapter, it is clear that the company wants to rebuild trust, confidence, and momentum. The hiring comeback may not be extremely large, but it aims to be strong, steady, and future-ready. With AI as the new foundation, Microsoft hopes to rise again—not only as a big company, but as a smarter and more innovative one.