Microsoft AI Leader Predicts Automation in White-Collar Jobs

Microsoft’s AI CEO is joining a chorus of executives who say they anticipate widespread job automation driven by artificial intelligence.

Mustafa Suleyman, the Microsoft AI chief, said in an interview with the Financial Times that he predicts most, if not every, task in white-collar fields will be automated by AI within the next year or year and a half.

“I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” Suleyman said in the interview that was published Wednesday. “So white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an 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 a quite different relationship to the technology, and that’s happened in the last six months,” he said.

AI’s rapid advancement over the past half-decade has brought about real, documented shifts in how some white-collar work is performed.

Business Insider recently reported that “AI fatigue” has hit software engineering: the technology has unlocked productivity but also exhaustion, as workers are expected to take on more work at once.

Some leaders and pioneers in AI say that artificial intelligence will advance far enough to replace entire workforces.

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 cofounder of Anthropic, previously said AI could wipe out 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 is coming,” Amodei told Axios in an interview. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.