Microsoft’s AI Chief sets 18-month deadline for the end of white-collar work as we know it

Before joining Microsoft in 2024, Mustafa Suleyman was a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind division. (File photo)

Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and others have been betting big time on artificial intelligence and laying off people across the board.

During an interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, said most white-collar jobs will be replaced AI in the next 18 months.

Suleyman joins a huge chunk of executives around the world who have predicted that AI will be taking over exing job roles.

“I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. 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 an AI within the next 12 to 18 months”, Suleyman told the publication.

He added that AI agents will soon be able to handle the workflow of large organisations in the next two to three years and will improve over time. Story continues below this ad

Talking about software engineering, Suleyman said developers are already using “AI-assed coding for the vast majority of their code production.”

Microsoft has been constantly pushing its employees to use AI in the workplace.

Spotify CEO Gustav Soderstrom, during the company’s fourth earnings call, said that its best developers “have not written a single line of code since December”, but now instead use an internal AI tool called Honk to generate code.

The tech giant is also pursuing what Suleyman called “true self-sufficiency” building its very own large language models instead of relying on OpenAI.Story continues below this ad

Until now, Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest backers, has relied on the Sam Altman-led company to power its AI products like Copilot.

While the tech giant has also invested in OpenAI’s rivals like Anthropic and Mral, Suleyman said that it would launch its in-house developed AI model “sometime this year.”

Last year, we saw tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and others laying off more than 123,931 employees, and if the opening weeks of the year are an indication, the layoff wave is expected to continue this year as well.