Microsoft is to offer buyouts to around 60,000 of its staff in an attempt to reduce costs as the use of AI grows, according to a report by Bloomberg.

A spokesperson for the tech giant told the newswire the buyouts will be offered to a quarter of the tech giant's workforce in the UK, US and Canada at a vice president level and below.

Divisions such as Xbox, Windows, Copilot and finance are fully participating in the offer, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, while certain employees such as those focused on data centres, sales, marketing, cybersecurity and quantum computing are not eligible for the offer.

In a note to staff, the company's chief people officer Amy Coleman said the voluntary exit offer will give eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a choice to make that transition with support.

“The voluntary exit offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it. At the same time, we’ll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft,” she added.

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”

As of the end of June this year, Microsoft employed around 223,000 people, but the company has let thousands of workers go over the course of this year.

In July, the company offered buyouts to workers of retirement age and over 30 per cent of around 8,750 eligible people took the offer, according to Bloomberg. A spokesperson told the newswire that Microsoft expects fewer employees to accept the latest proposal.

In May and June, Microsoft implemented a series of job cuts which affected nearly three per cent of the company's global workforce, or approximately 6,000 employees.

Other technology firms have cut staff numbers including Amazon, which laid off an undisclosed number of staff in parts of its artificial general intelligence (AGI) organisation in July.

In a statement issued after enquiries from Reuters and CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson said the company was “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers” and that this had led to “some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organisation”, while continuing to invest in its most important AI priorities.

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