Congratulations, office workers. According to the highly questionable estimates of Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman, everything you do in your comfortable desk jobs will soon be automated with AI.
This is because the AI model, as claimed by Suleiman interview with financial Times Published on Wednesday, they are on the verge of achieving “human-level performance in most if not all professional tasks.”
“So the white-collar jobs where you’re sitting at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those jobs will be completely automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” Suleman said.
Suleman’s bold statement comes amid new concerns over AI’s ability to disrupt the job market. The release of Anthropic’s new cloud cowork AI agent helped trigger a widespread selloff in the stock market last week, as investors feared it could automate tasks like legal work, something that has also threatened the bottom line of big software companies that avoid providing specialized programs to complete those office tasks.
According to the Microsoft AI chief, heavy AI automation can already be seen in areas like software engineering.
“Many software engineers report that they are now using AI-assisted coding for most of their code production,” Suleiman said in the interview, “meaning that their roles have now shifted from doing strategic things like debugging, testing, architecting, and into this meta function of “putting things into production.”
“So it’s a completely different relationship to technology,” he said. “And this has happened over the last six months.”
It is true that many programmers are now using AI coding tools and agents. Microsoft’s CEO – the main CEO, not the AI one – Satya Nadella has claimed that more than a quarter of its code is written with AI.
But the quality of AI-generated code and other outputs remains questionable, with some studies finding that these purported automation miracles overwhelmingly fail to accomplish common remote work and office tasks.
There is equal doubt about AI Potential to generate economic benefits for companies adopting it. Some research suggests that AI does not increase productivity and may even slow down workflows, including in areas like programming, where humans are forced to double and triple check AI outputs. AI can actually accelerate work, as with its arrival employees are expected to take on even more workload, resulting in reduced quality of work.
Nonetheless, AI leaders insist on sounding the alarm. Last summer, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reiterated that the technology is poised to disrupt entire categories of work.
Don’t get us wrong: AI-related layoffs are already happening. However, many companies are using the excuse of AI to fire employees for purely financial reasons, which some people call “oh wash” And given how fresh AI automation is, it’s still unclear how sustainable heavy reliance on the technology will be for companies in the long term, a reality that some over-eager companies are already having to accept.
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