Microsoft AI CEO: "Most" white-collar tasks will be automated in 18 months

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts the end of traditional white-collar work in 18 months.

"I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks," Suleyman says in an interview with the Financial Times. "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."

Suleyman leads Microsoft's AI division, which has invested billions in OpenAI and Anthropic and operates Copilot, one of the most widely used AI work tools. He describes the shift as already underway: In software engineering, developers are already using "AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even predicted that half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within one to five years. He is already observing that fewer junior and mid-level employees are needed. AI could be better than humans in many areas within one to two years, while the labor market adapts with a delay.

Suleyman's boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, on the other hand, sees more of a shift where existing cognitive tasks might be automated, but new, more demanding tasks would emerge.