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The story
On the 26th, Microsoft announced it will introduce a voluntary resignation program for some employees in the US, Canada, UK, and India. The program covers roughly 60,000 employees — over 25% of the entire workforce — including the Copilot conversational AI unit, the Xbox business, and the finance department, while some marketing, sales, engineering, and safety roles are excluded. The move is reportedly driven by massive AI-related investment weighing on the company’s finances, and on 5ch, reactions focused on where the line was drawn between which job functions survive and which get cut, as well as the reality that even a high-performing company can have its cash flow squeezed by AI spending.
[Las Vegas, Kyodo] US IT giant Microsoft (MS) announced on the 26th that it will introduce a voluntary resignation program for some employees in the US, Canada, UK, and India. According to Western media, the program covers roughly 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of the entire workforce. Massive investment related to artificial intelligence (AI) is weighing on the company’s finances, and it is overhauling its workforce on a large scale to make operations more efficient.
According to reports, the program targets employees below a certain rank. It covers the Copilot conversational AI service, the Xbox home console business, and finance, among others. Meanwhile, some departments in marketing, sales, engineering, and safety measures are not included. Those eligible must decide by early December whether to accept the offer, and those who do will leave the company effective December 31.
October 27, 2026, 06:14, Kyodo News
Source: 47news.jp / Original article here
What people said
Please don't let it just become a glorified paperweight 😭
Go sell your crappy console already ("shit box" — a derogatory nickname for Xbox)
Still needed: marketing, sales, engineering, safety
Is the whole world headed this way, just like in this news story?
If it's just upkeep, marketing isn't needed either, and sales that's nothing but routine work is becoming unnecessary too
An infrastructure company doesn't need marketing
Marketing, sales, and engineering are all getting the axe
Especially the first two — those jobs are basically disappearing
Well, America itself is a country with no lifetime employment to begin with
Japan's probably the only backward country still hiring new grads for that
Not because AI can just do the job instead?
That's just the official line — it's really AI-driven unemployment underneath
That's part of it too, but AI needs a ton of money, so in a different sense it's still "unemployment caused by AI"
Right now MS's AI investment is outpacing its operating cash flow, so money's bleeding out
Their assets are huge, but they're short on cash
If you make something good, it sells itself
Japanese companies are exactly the ones who never got that
On the sales side, several thousand people were already cut back in July and September 2026, mainly in the Xbox division and enterprise sales
What's left now is just the capable sales staff who survived the cut
Turns out the "labor shortage" was just a flat-out lie
This'll obviously happen in Japan too
The real show starts once humanoid physical AI gets fully rolled out lol
Blue-collar jobs will get cut too lol
Robot batteries don't last long, so will they end up running on a cord?
It really comes down to how much time passes between white-collar jobs getting streamlined by AI and AI robots actually being developed
Even right now it's already worse than the "employment ice age" (Japan's brutal hiring freeze era for new grads in the late '90s–2000s)
Construction workers and plumbers too — a future's coming where AI gives the orders and watches over them, and when efficiency drops or they miss quota, their pay gets cut
and eventually they get fired
Mario & Luigi: "Right?" (both are famous fictional plumbers)
If a flood of people rushes into blue-collar work
and it suddenly overflows with people from their 20s all the way to their 60s
that'll just intensify competition in its own way
Blue-collar wages will probably crash like crazy
There won't be any flood like that
In the end, everyone hates that kind of work
Stuff like shipping addresses for equipment, postal invoice slips, grabbing monthly invoices and sorting them by code —
AI can't take that work off my hands.
They call it AI, "artificial intelligence," but underneath it's nothing but recycled hearsay and bot scripts — really just "artificial non-intelligence" (a pun on jinkō chinō, "artificial intelligence," vs. jinkō munō, a term for dumb chatbots).
It's only good as something to chat with online.
Go Premium and what it can do changes
Though only somewhat
Maybe instead of Copilot you should just build a proper AI-based system
Simple-judgment routine work is exactly AI's strong suit, right?
Copilot itself isn't useful, but
the area with the highest AI demand right now is exactly that kind of invoice/paperwork processing
Hmm, I wonder about that
Companies in similar fields are in the middle of a layoff boom right now, so it's probably pretty rough
Isn't there basically no use for them?
They're talent that's below AI-level
There's probably demand for a one-person IT department role, but the pay wouldn't match
Background and Key Points of This Story
This isn’t the first round of layoffs at Microsoft — in 2026, cuts of several thousand people, centered on the Xbox division and enterprise sales, already took place in July and September. The fact that this latest round includes the Copilot conversational AI development division shows that AI is both a trigger for the job cuts and that the AI business itself is facing a tough review of its own profitability. Opinions on the thread were split over whether the cuts stem from “AI automation making staff unnecessary” or from “worsening cash flow caused by AI investment” — the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but which one gets emphasized changes the overall impression. There were also comments noting that even though Microsoft’s own business performance is strong, AI-related investment is outpacing operating cash flow, suggesting this should be read not as the conventional “poor performance equals layoffs” story, but as a case where even a high-performing company carries out restructuring because of investment burden.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Microsoft seeks 60,000 voluntary resignations, over 25% of staff targeted, AI investment burden.”
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