[NEW YORK] Microsoft is keen to show employees how much artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming its own workplace, even as the company terminates thousands of personnel.

During a presentation this week, chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said AI tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a source familiar with his remarks.

Althoff said AI saved Microsoft more than US$500 million last year in its call centres alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the source, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter.

The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of US dollars, he said.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Tech executives have been increasingly vocal about the potential for AI to automate labour currently performed by humans. Salesforce has said that 30 per cent of internal work at the company is being handled by AI, allowing it to reduce hiring for some roles. Executives at Alphabet and Meta Platforms have said significant chunks of code are now being written with AI.

At Microsoft, AI generated 35 per cent of the code for new products, accelerating launch times, Althoff said. The company’s GitHub Copilot is a leader in the market for AI coding tools and has 15 million users, Microsoft said in April.

AI implementation has fuelled replacement anxiety for many workers, particularly in the tech industry. Microsoft has announced cuts of about 15,000 employees this year, with a wave of layoffs last week targeting customer-facing roles such as sales.

Althoff stressed to employees that AI could make them more effective as sellers. Through the use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, each salesperson is finding more leads, closing deals quicker and generating 9 per cent more revenue, he said.

Productivity gains from AI were “not a predominant factor” in the job reductions of recent months, Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith said on Wednesday (Jul 9) during an event announcing a donation of over US$4 billion in cash and technology to schools with a focus on spreading AI skills. BLOOMBERG

Even as Trump has announced new tariff actions in recent days, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have lingered near records.

“You’ve seen the markets walk us back from a worst-case scenario in terms of tariffs,” said Angelo Zino, technology analyst at CFRA Research.

While Nvidia still faces US export controls to China as well as broader tariff uncertainty, the company’s deal to build AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia during a Trump state visit in May showed there was also potential upside in Trump’s trade policy.

“We’ve seen the administration using Nvidia chips as a bargaining chip,” Zino said.

Bullish on 2026

Nvidia’s latest surge to US$4t marks a new threshold in a fairly consistent rise over the past two years as AI enthusiasm has built.

In 2025 so far, the company’s shares have risen 20%, whereas the Nasdaq has gained 6%.

The Taiwan-born Huang has wowed investors with a series of advances, including its core product: graphics processing units (GPUs), which are foundational to many of the generative AI programmes pursued throughout the technology sector, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics and other cutting-edge domains.

The company has also unveiled new advances in recent months, highlighting its Blackwell system, which Huang said in March will soon enable virtually all productions to be “created and brought to life long before it is realised physically”.

However, Nvidia’s winning streak was challenged early in 2025 following revelations about the Chinese DeepSeek venture, which prompted worries that AI investment growth would slow. The company lost some US$600b in market valuation during this period.

Nvidia’s Huang has welcomed DeepSeek as a growing presence in technology, while arguing against US export constraints.

In the most recent quarter, Nvidia reported earnings of nearly US$19b despite a US$4.5b hit from US export controls designed to limit sales of cutting-edge technology to China.

The first-quarter earnings period also revealed that momentum for AI remained strong throughout the tech industry. Many of the biggest technology companies – Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta – are racing each other in the multi-billion-dollar race to win the AI race.

A recent UBS survey of technology executives showed Nvidia widening its lead over rivals.

Zino said Nvidia’s latest surge reflected a fuller understanding of DeepSeek, which has acted as a stimulant to investment for complex reasoning models rather than a threat to Nvidia’s business.

Nvidia is at the forefront of “AI agents”, the current focus in generative AI in which machines are able to reason and infer more than in the past, he said.

“Overall the demand landscape has improved for 2026 for these more complex reasoning models,” Zino said.

– Agence France-Presse

The hum of an escalator, the rumble of a baggage belt and hurried footsteps are all interspersed with snippets of the lady on the tannoy: “Boarding at Gate 18”.

The UK’s biggest flight hub plans to make your experience at the airport sound, well, even more like an airport.

In what may be a bid to overhaul its image after a disastrous offsite fire in March, or just a marketing spin for summer holiday flying, Heathrow says it has commissioned a new “mood-matching” sound mix, which will be looped seamlessly and played throughout the airport’s terminals this summer.

The airport says “Music for Heathrow” is designed to help kickstart passenger holidays by reflecting “excitement and anticipation”.

“Nothing compares to the excitement of stepping foot in the airport for the start of a summer holiday, and this new soundtrack perfectly captures those feelings,” claims Lee Boyle, who heads up the airport’s terminals.

Whatever the aim, it will raise questions over what additional background noises passengers require, when they already have the sounds of an airport – fussing children, people doing their last farewells into their mobile phone, last calls for late-comers – all around them.

The airport invited Grammy nominee “musician, multi-instrumentalist and producer” Jordan Rakei to create the soundtrack, which it says is the first ever created entirely with the sounds of an airport. However, Heathrow said the track also featured sounds from famous movie scenes, including passengers tapping their feet in Bend It Like Beckham and the beeps of a security scanner from Love Actually.

It is conceived as a tribute to Brian Eno’s album Music for Airports, released in 1979, which is seen as a defining moment in the growth of ambient music, a genre which is supposed to provide a calming influence on listeners, while also being easy to ignore.

“I spent time in every part of the airport, recording so many sounds from baggage belts to boarding calls, and used them to create something that reflects that whole pre-flight vibe,” said Rakei.

The recording also features passports being stamped, planes taking off and landing, chatter, the ding of a lift and the sound of a water fountain, which some people may appreciate as a source of ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response. Fans of ASMR say certain sounds give them a pleasant tingling sensation.