Hundreds of Microsoft employees recently shared their compensation in an internal company spreadsheet viewed by Business Insider, and a new analysis of the data sheds light on how employees in the company's new AI organization are earning compared to their peers.
The AI group was launched in March under the direction of DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman and is responsible for Microsoft's consumer AI products, including its Copilot AI chatbot and Bing search engine.
BI analyzed more than 500 filings from people who identified themselves as Microsoft employees in the U.S. The spreadsheets list salaries, performance-based raises, promotions and bonus percentages.
The main takeaway is that Microsoft is paying big for AI talent, part of a race to build what could become the next major computing platform. Experts in deep learning and other AI fields are in short supply, so companies are competing fiercely for them, primarily by offering big salaries and generous stock-based compensation. Expensive acquisitions have valued some of its engineers as worth as much as $4 million each.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Microsoft
Below are some highlights from Microsoft's exclusive data:
According to information employees shared in a spreadsheet, the average compensation for all roles in the Microsoft AI group was about 37% higher than the company-wide average in the U.S. People who self-identified as software engineers within the Microsoft AI group were paid about 48% higher than all software engineering roles in the U.S. The average compensation for data scientists was about 11% higher than the overall U.S. average.
The chart below shows averages for various Microsoft divisions, based on internal company spreadsheets obtained by BI, and also shows average compensation for all roles, particularly software engineers and data scientists (the Microsoft AI group had fewer role types to compare with other organizations).
Microsoft employees typically share this information anonymously through spreadsheets to promote pay transparency, but these are not official Microsoft corporate documents. The spreadsheets that BI displays only include information that employees voluntarily decided to share and are not comprehensive.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
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