Microsoft's AI boss says AI could replace all white-collar jobs within 18 months

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO, recently sat down with the Financial Times to discuss all things AI, and he had a few words to say about AI one day taking over and making jobs and employment a thing of the past. In fact, when it comes to white-collar jobs that involve sitting at a computer day in and day out, Suleyman has set a timeline of 12 to 18 months for those jobs to become redundant and "fully automated by an AI."

"I think we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks," Mustafa Suleyman says. "White-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer - either being, you know, 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 notes that this will be due to AI achieving "human-level performance" on nearly all professional tasks, regardless of industry. He adds that this AI advance has already reached the software engineering sector, where he says "AI-assisted coding" is now a mainstay.

Of course, Mustafa Suleyman is not alone in saying that AI will make a wide range of jobs obsolete, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could replace half of entry-level white-collar jobs. Some analysts have even predicted that AI will lead to an unprecedented 80% unemployment rate as a wide range of jobs disappear.

Suleyman's 12- to 18-month prediction that AI will automate all white-collar jobs is alarming and has even led US Senator Bernie Sanders to call it an "economic earthquake" if it comes true. Of course, one has to wonder whether 'Microsoft CEO' or 'Executive' is among the white-collar jobs that AI can fully automate.