Microsoft AI Boss Mustafa Suleyman: Most White-Collar Jobs Will Be Automated Within 18 Months

 

“Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, has predicted that AI will be capable of automating the vast majority of white-collar professional tasks within the next 12 to 18 months.

The Financial Times reports that Mustafa Suleyman, who leads Microsoft’s AI division, has made a bold prediction about the near-term impact of AI on white-collar professions. In an interview with the Times published this week, Suleyman stated that he expects most, if not all, tasks performed by white-collar workers will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.

According to Suleyman, AI systems will achieve human-level performance across a wide range of professional duties. “I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” Suleyman said in the interview. “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 Microsoft AI chief pointed to software engineering as an early indicator of this trend. He noted that developers are already using AI-assisted coding for the majority of their code production, representing a fundamental shift in how the work is performed. “It’s a quite different relationship to the technology, and that’s happened in the last six months,” he said.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence over the past several years has already begun to transform white-collar work in observable ways. Recent reporting has highlighted the emergence of what some call “AI fatigue” among software engineers, where the technology has delivered productivity gains but also brought increased exhaustion as workers face pressure to handle larger workloads simultaneously.

Microsoft has positioned itself at the forefront of workplace AI integration. The company has developed products such as Copilot and made significant investments in AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, cementing its role as a major force in bringing artificial intelligence tools to professional environments.

Breitbart News previously reported that Microsoft has integrated AI into Windows without fully understanding the security risks this creates:

Security concerns stem from known defects inherent in most large language models (LLMs), including Copilot. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that LLMs can provide factually erroneous and illogical answers, a behavior known as “hallucinations.” This means users cannot fully trust the output of AI assistants like Copilot, Gemini, or Claude, and must independently verify the information.

Another significant issue with LLMs is their vulnerability to prompt injections. Hackers can exploit this flaw by planting malicious instructions in websites, resumes, and emails, which the AI eagerly follows without discerning between valid user prompts and untrusted, third-party content. These vulnerabilities can lead to data exfiltration, malicious code execution, and cryptocurrency theft.

Suleyman’s prediction adds his voice to a growing number of AI industry leaders who have warned about the potential for widespread job displacement due to artificial intelligence. Stuart Russell [1], a prominent computer scientist who co-authored one of the most authoritative textbooks on AI, stated in an interview last year that political leaders are confronting the possibility of 80 percent unemployment driven by AI. Russell suggested that positions ranging from surgeons to chief executives could be at risk of replacement.

Similarly, Dario Amodei, the CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, has previously warned that AI could eliminate approximately half of all entry-level white-collar positions. “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.””

 

1. Stuart Russell is a British computer scientist and professor at UC Berkeley known for co-authoring the, authoritative textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach with Peter Norvig. He is a leading expert on safe AI, AI ethics, and human-compatible AI, focusing on ensuring advanced AI systems remain beneficial to humanity.