A top executive at Microsoft revealed internally that AI has helped the tech giant save more than half a billion dollars last year in its call centre alone, according to a Bloomberg report.

Microsoft’s chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said during a presentation this week that its AI tools are driving productivity gains across sales, customer service, and software engineering.

This comes a week after Microsoft said it is laying off 9,000, or 4% of its workforce, its biggest since it laid off 10,000 workers in 2023.

It wasn't clear that the current round of layoff was triggered by AI adoption at the tech company. 

Earlier in April this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that 20%-30% of the company's code was being generated by AI.

Similarly, AI was generating more than 30% of the code at Microsoft's rival Google as per the CEO Sundar Pichai.

Increasing AI adoption at companies adds fuel to the fear that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs in the coming years. Hundreds of layoffs have also been reported at other tech giants such as Google and Meta.