Former Microsoft employee Merill Fernando has called for a significant shift in how the technology giant operates, arguing that the company needs fewer employees, less organisational bureaucracy and a stronger focus on AI-powered, agentic work to remain competitive.
Fernando’s post comes a day after Microsoft announced that it is extending a voluntary severance package to roughly 60,000 qualified employees in the US, the UK, Canada and India.
Drawing on his experience working inside Microsoft, Fernando said the company’s structure is characterised by numerous small organisations, overlapping management layers and silos that make it difficult to implement improvements consistently across the business. In a post reflecting on his departure from Microsoft three months ago to start his own company, Fernando acknowledged the human cost of the company’s workforce reductions, saying the layoffs had deeply affected former colleagues, their families and their children. However, HT.com cannot independently verify the claims made in the post. The program is designed to assist personnel exploring alternative career paths by offering monetary assistance. As the organization prioritizes substantial investments in artificial intelligence, it is simultaneously working to optimize operational costs. Qualified staff members will receive mails outlining the specifics and conditions of the offer, as per the company. Despite recognising the personal toll, Fernando argued that Microsoft’s underlying problem is structural, suggesting the company has accumulated too many employees, organisational layers and internal divisions.
It took a security breach and the subsequent launch of Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) to drive broader adoption across the company, according to his account. Fernando argued that the experience demonstrated how organisational complexity can prevent beneficial technologies from being implemented quickly, even within a company with Microsoft’s resources and technical capabilities. He argued that in a business environment built around AI agents and smaller human teams, initiatives that once took years to implement across Microsoft could potentially be rolled out in months.
