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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says AI will achieve “human-level performance” in white-collar work.
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He predicts that most tasks in that area can be automated in the next 12 to 18 months.
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Several leaders in the AI industry have warned of imminent mass job replacement.
Microsoft’s AI CEO is joining a chorus of executives who say they anticipate widespread job automation driven by artificial intelligence.
Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft AI, said in an interview with the Financial Times that he predicts that most, if not all, work in white-collar fields will be automated by AI in the next year or year and a half.
“I think we will have human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” Suleyman said in the interview published Wednesday. “So a white-collar job, where you’re sitting in front of a computer, or being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person – most of those tasks will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
The CEO said the trend is already observable in software engineering, in which employees are using “AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production.”
“It’s quite a different relationship with technology, and that’s happened in the last six months,” he said.
The rapid advancement of AI over the last half decade has led to real and documented changes in the way some white-collar work is performed.
Business Insider recently reported that “AI fatigue” has hit software engineering: technology has unlocked productivity but also exhaustion, as workers are expected to take on more work at once.
Microsoft is one of the leading companies behind the push to introduce AI into the workplace, building products like Copilot and investing in OpenAI and Anthropic.
Some leaders and pioneers in AI say that artificial intelligence will advance enough to replace entire workers.
Stuart Russell, a computer scientist who co-authored one of the world’s most authoritative books on AI, said in an interview last year that political leaders are looking at “80% unemployment” due to AI, as jobs ranging from surgeons to CEOs are at risk of being replaced.
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, previously said that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what’s coming,” Amodei told Axios in an interview. “I don’t think that’s on people’s radar.”