In a press release summarizing Day 1 of the Microsoft Ignite Conference in San Francisco, the company highlighted its record-setting low developer attendance. Compared to roughly 10,000 in-person attendees that identified as developers at Ignite 2024, this year’s event registered only 4,600 – less than half of last year’s total.
“This represents an impressively low milestone, and we hope to drive it even lower over the next two years,” the press release stated.
During his opening keynote address, Microsoft Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff – fresh off his leave of absence during the massive layoffs in July – celebrated the drop in attendance with visible enthusiasm.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to see so few of you in the audience this year!” Althoff announced from the main stage. “The reduction in developers is proof positive that our AI strategy is working exactly as intended.”
“We believe we can achieve full developer displacement by the end of the decade – if not sooner,” Althoff continued. “Eliminating developers is one of the hardest challenges our industry has faced, but with our agentic AI capabilities and our deep commercial partnerships, we are uniquely positioned to lead the world into this exciting, developer-free future.”
Approaching his twelfth year in Microsoft’s commercial leadership, Althoff praised the acceleration of the company’s AI-driven workforce disruption. “In the past year, our goal of replacing every developer in every organization on the planet has come significantly closer to reality,” he said, citing huge deployment numbers for GitHub Copilot and massive layoff numbers from the largest tech firms.
Althoff then pivoted to what he called “the most exciting part of Ignite this year”: an array of untested, early experimental preview features that may or may not function in demos and that most enterprise customers can’t even take advantage of since they aren’t officially supported. “We are proud to bring you our boldest innovation yet: existing features that were renamed just last night, so they seem like something completely new” he said, while showcasing an animated slide titled “WorkIQ“.
He then turned it over to a riveting demo of WorkIQ where a fictitious team was tasked with using Copilot to organize the manufacture, transport, and delivery of thousands of t-shirts to the attendees in 6 minutes flat, a totally unrealistic scenario. Nevertheless the audience was warned in advance to clap and cheer afterwards, or else the Event Compliance Agent would electrify their seats and administer shock therapy. After the applause died down, Althoff mused: “Fantastic! At past conferences with developers in attendance, we felt obligated to give out expensive hardware, but with AI we can just give out a cheap t-shirt!.”
He added that the company’s north star remains deploying AI “to every room in the house,” a phrase he used no fewer than five times in the keynote. “Living room, boardroom, kitchen, scrum room – if there is a room, we believe AI slop belongs in it,” Althoff proclaimed proudly.