Microsoft’s investments in artificial intelligence run as deep as potentially overvaluing the engineers on its AI-led projects more than those tasked with the company’s proven revenue driver, Azure.
According to a spreadsheet obtained by Business Insider, a Microsoft engineer in the company’s AI business cashes in a salary of $377,611 a year which is part $192,667 base pay plus $184,944 in stock and cash bonuses.
While the second half of that $300K salary is subject to market demand, Microsoft’s stock is among the highest valued tech companies in the world, assuring that AI engineers have gotten close to that amount over the past three years.
More volatile than Microsoft’s position in the stock market is its vision of AI demand, as investors get anxious about long-term and sustainable profitability.
Ironically, Microsoft’s Azure team employees receive a much lower cash and bonus ceiling at $77,268 despite the company’s cloud business and services division being the workhorse of the firm for over the past twenty-two consecutive quarters. The base pay of a Microsoft AI engineer isn’t too far off from that of the Azure employee who look to receive an average around $174,196 a year but the seemingly arbitrary cap of $77K saddles their earning potential at around $252,464 a year.
Despite jumping into the large language model and pre-generative pool early as it announced Bing Chat that eventually became Copilot, the company only recently formalized its AI business with Microsoft AI in March 2024. Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared the plan to form Microsoft AI with Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan coming over from Deep Mind and Inflection to head up the organization.
It’s unclear if the inflated salary range is a new bargaining chip for Microsoft or a carryover practice from Deep Mind and Inflection where Suleyman and Simonyan brought over several employees to join the ranks in Redmond, Washington.
Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft. They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO
Nevertheless, Microsoft’s AI division is now responsible for the company’s most public bet on a consumer-facing project since Windows Phone while trying to appease investors with a pivot to stable commercial-like revenues in the short-term. Perhaps indicative or coincidental, Microsoft’s new AI organization also helms the company’s other low-growth businesses in Bing, Search and Edge.