Washington: Full-time employees in Microsoft Corp are getting no salary rais this year, the tech giant informed, adding that it is reducing the budget for bonuses and stock awards, Reuters reported, citing Insider.
Insider cited an internal email from the company's CEO, Satya Nadella. However, the company has not yet responded to Reuters' request for comment.
The Insider reported Nadella saying that Microsoft invested significantly last year in compensation driven by market conditions and company performance. It had doubled the company's global merit budget, but economic conditions this year are different across many dimensions.
Microsoft on January announced the laying off of 10,000 employees, noting the slowing growth in a turbulent economy.
Now, the company focuses on generative AI, where it sees business.
Microsoft is collaborating with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. OpenAI was funded to the tune of billions of dollars by Microsoft. It has been infusing AI tech into its office products, along with its search engine Bing
Meanwhile, Microsoft revealed in early April that India has emerged as one of the top three countries for its new Bing preview, which includes ChatGPT and is its largest image creation market. The official claims that the search engine is significantly superior to its competitor Google.
Microsoft unveiled the latest Bing preview on February 7 with ChatGPT as its power source. An artificial intelligence chatbot named ChatGPT was created by OpenAI and released in November 2022.
"Search has changed and will change. It's not going away. Just like when television came into existence, radio didn't go away, but TV got a lot more excitement. The same will happen here. The new capabilities of AI of chat of answers are now increasingly exciting because they're helping answer questions that search didn't do. And with Bing, we are completely unique in that leadership today," Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer of Microsoft, said.