Microsoft AI chief predicts most white collar work will be automated within 18 months
Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times that advances in compute will let AI reach human level on most professional tasks within about a year to 18 months, even as current evidence shows limited real‑world disruption so far.
- Suleyman forecasts AI will perform human level on most professional tasks within a year to 18 months.
- He singled out accounting, legal work, marketing, and project management as especially vulnerable to automation.
- Suleyman pointed to rapid growth in compute as the main accelerator enabling models to code and perform professional tasks better than humans.
- So far adoption has been narrow, producing marginal productivity gains and in some studies making developers slower.
- Employment impacts are emerging: consultancies counted about 55,000 AI related job cuts in 2025 and Microsoft cut about 15,000 roles last year.
- Markets reacted sharply, with a selloff in software stocks after firms introduced agentic AI for enterprises, while Microsoft aims to build independent foundation models and pursue greater AI capability.