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On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is cutting less than 3% of its global workforce, including LinkedIn. The company which an estimated 228,000 employees as of last June, meaning the layoffs will affect approximately 6,000 employees. The tech giant, which makes popular software products Windows and Word, will make cuts across various locations, teams, and roles. “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Fast Company. The news comes less than two weeks after the Redmond, Washington-based company beat first quarter earnings expectations, driven by its Azure c…

Microsoft just redesigned all of its Office icons to embrace the AI era, and, according to the company, that means ditching solid shapes for all things “fluid and vibrant.” The 12 new icons, which began rolling out on October 1, encompass all of Microsoft’s platforms from Outlook to Word Documents and Teams. This is the first time that Microsoft has updated the icons’ aesthetics in seven years, and the company’s designers have reworked every logo to be curvier, brighter, and more colorful. “Today, as we roll out refreshed icons for Microsoft 365 apps, small but significant design changes are a reflection and a signal,” a Microsoft blog post, published on October 1…

Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of a cloud infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI. Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup. The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft…

Microsoft said Wednesday that its profit for the October-December quarter grew 10% as it works to capitalize on the huge amounts of money it has spent to advance its artificial intelligence technology. But while its overall profits and revenue beat Wall Street expectations, it slightly missed projections for its closely watched cloud computing business, a centerpiece of its AI efforts. The company reported net income for the quarter of $24.1 billion, or $3.23 per share, beating Wall Street expectations of $3.11 per share. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker posted revenue of $69.6 billion in the quarter, up 12% from the previous year, also beating expectations.…

Microsoft released its annual Work Trend Index report on Tuesday, which argued that 2025 is the year that companies stop simply experimenting with AI and start building it into key missions. As part of its release, Microsoft put together a glossary that it says is comprised of “new terms to know for a new world of work.” Here’s the list: Agent: An AI-powered system that can reason, plan, and act to complete tasks or entire workflows autonomously, with human oversight at key moments. Agent boss: A human manager of one or more agents. Capacity gap: The deficit between business demands and the maximum capacity of humans alone to meet them. Digital lab…

At Microsoft’s Ignite conference on November 18, the company unveiled new AI-powered software features designed to make coders’ lives easier—including a tool to automatically fix security issues as new vulnerabilities are discovered. “Over this past year, the nature of being a software engineer has really started to change,” says Amanda Silver, corporate vice president and head of product for apps and agents at Microsoft. “And our focus has been on tackling the most miserable, soul-draining parts of the job and really transforming them, so that developers can kind of bring joy back to their day-to-day lives.” One result of that effort is an AI offering, now in …

Artificial intelligence has rapidly started finding its place in the workplace, but this year will be remembered as the moment when companies pushed past simply experimenting with AI and started building around it, Microsoft said in a blog post accompanying its annual Work Trend Index report. As part of this shift, Microsoft is dubbing 2025 the year of the “Frontier Firm.” “Like the digital native companies of a generation ago, they understand the power of pairing irreplaceable human insight with AI and agents to unlock outsized value,” Jared Spataro, CMO of AI at Work at Microsoft, said in the post. These so-called Frontier Firms will be built around “on-dem…

Microsoft said Monday it will be shipping Nvidia‘s most advanced artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates as part of a deal approved by the U.S. Commerce Department. The Redmond, Washington software giant said licenses approved in September under “stringent” safeguards enable it to ship more than 60,000 Nvidia chips, including the California chipmaker’s advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell chips, for use in data centers in the Middle Eastern country. The agreement appeared to contradict President Donald The President’s remarks in a “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday that such chips would not be exported outside the U.S. Asked by CBS News’ Norah O’D…

Quantum researchers are in a race for qubits, and Microsoft is in the thick of the competition. Microsoft has spent the last 20 years pursuing a topological approach to quantum development. Last week, they had a breakthrough: The company counted eight topological qubits on their Majorana 1 chip. They published a paper in Nature, got a glowing New York Times piece about a “new state of matter,” and buoyed quantum stocks across the market. Eight qubits isn’t anywhere near what would be needed to reach full-scale quantum computing. That number is in the millions, and they would need to be error-corrected. Other companies, like IBM and Google, are much further ahead …

Microsoft’s cloud computing and artificial intelligence business helped deliver $70.1 billion in sales and boosted profits by 18% for the January-March quarter, a dose of relief for investors during a turbulent time for the tech sector and U.S. economy. The company reported quarterly net income of $25.8 billion, or $3.46 per share, beating Wall Street expectations for earnings of $3.22 a share. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker posted revenue of $70.1 billion in the period, its third fiscal quarter, up 13% from the same period a year ago and also beating Wall Street expectations. Analysts polled by FactSet expected Microsoft to post revenue of $68.44 billion …

We’ve all heard the familiar directive: “We’re going through another reorganization and will be cutting 20% of headcount, but priorities remain the same and, in fact, may expand.” Meanwhile, you’re being told to “just make it work” without offering additional resources, guidance, or support. This conversation, unfortunately, isn’t unique. It represents the silent crisis engulfing middle management across America. Middle managers—who oversee 90% of the U.S. workforce—are facing unprecedented challenges in 2025. Recent KPMG data reveals nearly one-third are actively disengaged, while 62% report unsustainable stress levels as they struggle with expanded responsibilit…

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Ageism in Hollywood is a tale as old as time. It’s well-documented that older women have been less represented in mainstream media and female actors over 40 are less likely to get work compared to their male counterparts. The stigma surrounding aging women in entertainment has been so pervasive that many actresses have felt forced to hide the natural realities of aging. Actr…

For the first two-and-a-half years of the generative AI revolution, the AI arms race has been waged between competing companies seeking to make bank from the promise and potential of the technology. But things are maturing in the AI world—and with it, there’s another frontline for AI: the military. Scale AI, the company set up by Alexandr Wang, has been awarded what CNBC reports is a multimillion-dollar deal to help develop Thunderforge, which the U.S. Department of Defense calls “an initiative designed to integrate artificial intelligence into military operational and theater-level planning, and fusing cutting-edge modeling and simulation tools.” Wang told CNBC that …

Everyday Health Group, a division of Ziff Davis, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired theSkimm, the newsletter and media brand dedicated to giving women the information they need to make confident decisions. TheSkimm was cofounded by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg in 2012. They met in college, and then reconnected years later while working as news producers for NBC. The company began as a daily newsletter that was an essential daily news digest for millennial women (and men). Today, it offers multiple newsletters, podcasts, and a mobile app. It also houses Skimm Studios, which creates video and audio content, as well as SKM Lab, which allows brands to …

Fast Company’s Maria Jose Gutierrez Chavez reports on how millennials are taking over TikTok to share memories of life during the 2008 recession—and offer tips on how to survive. View the full article

Millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) are far more interested in buying homes today than they were just six months ago. That makes the group the only generation whose interest in homeownership has increased since September 2024. However, these same people are tending to put off the investment due to sky-high mortgage rates. The new data comes from an online survey of 2,230 adults conducted by Realtor.com. Six months ago, 15% of millennials said they were interested in buying a home. Now 23% are interested, according to the latest survey. Still, that doesn’t mean more 29- to 44-year-olds are actually buying homes. In a press release, Laura Eddy, vic…

The The President administration has agreed to resume student loan forgiveness for an estimated 2.5 million borrowers who are enrolled in certain federal repayment plans following a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers. Under the agreement reached Friday between the teachers union and the administration, the Education Department will process loan forgiveness for those eligible in certain repayment plans that offer lower monthly payments based on a borrower’s earnings. The government had stopped providing forgiveness under those plans based on its interpretation of a different court decision. The agreement will also protect borrowers from being hit with high …

A Minecraft Movie just beat Captain America and Mario at the box office. The new film, inspired by the beloved brick-based video game and starring Jack Black and Jason Mamoa, pulled in $157 million at its domestic box office opening this weekend. That’s more than double analysts’ early prediction that the film would gross $60 million. It’s also well past the record of the previous top opener of 2025, Disney’s Captain America: Brave New World, which netted $88.5 million at its opening weekend—meaning A Minecraft Movie has now enjoyed the most successful opening weekend of the year. By video game-to-movie adaptation standards, the Minecraft film is also playing in a…

Just a short drive outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, the quaint city of Kannapolis is seeing a rapid economic revival. The city, which was traditionally known for its textile mills, has recently transformed into a research hub in the for Southeast. And right in Kannapolis’s city center, less than a ten minute walk from the Georgian-style city hall, sits Atrium Health Ballpark: the home of the Minor League Baseball team known as the Cannon Ballers. Over the last five years, the Cannon Ballers have played an increasingly vital role in Kannapolis’s revitalization. Throughout the course of a season, the team’s total attendance is around 200,000 people—a number m…

AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the web—constantly. But website owners increasingly don’t want to give AI firms free rein. So they’re regaining control by cracking down on crawlers. To do this, they’re using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowed—or not—to scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some…

Where legislatures have refused to boost pay and benefits for workers, advocates have often taken the fight straight to voters. In recent years, voters in Michigan, Missouri, and Nebraska overwhelmingly backed higher state minimum wages and guaranteed paid sick leave at the polls. But despite that strong showing of support, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now trying to water down or even roll back the measures their constituents approved. In November, 58% of Missouri voters approved Proposition A, which raises the state minimum wage to $15 by 2026 and requires employers to provide paid sick leave. That level of support, said Missouri Jobs with Justice Polic…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Many companies forget AI-powered enterprise applications are just business apps at the end of the day. The reality is, AI is simply another arrow in our quiver, albeit incredibly more powerful. But what IT has done since generative AI exploded on the scene is frantically rush to deploy any and all possible applications, causing massive confusion and huge resource wastes, without delivering much …

Inside a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology late last year, scientists gave an AI system a new task: designing entirely new molecules for potential antibiotics from scratch. Within a day or two—following a few months of training—the algorithms had generated more than 29 million new molecules, unlike any that existed before. Traditional drug discovery is a slow, painstaking process. But AI is beginning to transform it. At MIT, the research is aimed at the growing challenge of antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill more than a million people globally each year. Existing antibiotics haven’t kept up with the threat. “The number of resistant bacteria…