Microsoft’s AI CEO is joining a chorus of executives who say they anticipate widespread job automation driven by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Mustafa Suleyman<\/a>, the Microsoft AI chief, said in an interview with the Financial Times that he predicts most, if not every, task in white-collar fields will be automated by AI within the next year or year and a half.<\/p>\n “I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” Suleyman said in the interview that was published Wednesday. “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 \u2014 most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”<\/p>\n The CEO said the trend is already observable in software engineering, in which employees are using “AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production.”<\/p>\n “It’s a quite different relationship to the technology, and that’s happened in the last six months,” he said.<\/p>\n AI’s rapid advancement over the past half-decade has brought about real, documented shifts in how some white-collar work is performed.<\/p>\n Business Insider recently reported that\u00a0“AI fatigue”<\/a>\u00a0has hit software engineering: the technology has unlocked productivity but also exhaustion, as workers are expected to take on more work at once.<\/p>\n Microsoft is one of the leading companies behind the push to introduce AI in the workplace, building products like Copilot<\/a> and investing in OpenAI and Anthropic<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some leaders and pioneers in AI say that artificial intelligence will advance far enough to replace entire workforces.<\/p>\n Stuart Russell, a computer scientist who co-authored one of the world’s most authoritative books on AI, said in an interview last year that political leaders are looking at “80% unemployment”<\/a> due to AI, as jobs ranging from surgeons to CEOs are at risk of being replaced.<\/p>\n Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic, previously said AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont responded to Suleyman’s prediction on Friday, saying that if what the Microsoft AI chief says is true, it’s an “economic earthquake.”<\/p>\n “We need a moratorium on new AI data centers to make sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires,” Sanders said.<\/p>\n