Artificial intelligence has disrupted global workforces over the past year — triggering mass layoffs, creating new job categories and drastically shifting skill demands. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warned this week that the situation would only worsen in the coming months. He predicted that most white-collar jobs would be lost to automation by next year. His remarks echo similarly apocalyptic predictions made by CEOs over the past year as AI grew increasingly ‘smarter’.
“I think we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. 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,” he told Financial Times during a recent interview.
He cited software engineering to underscore his point — noting that many now use AI-assisted coding for much of their production. Suleyman noted that the focus was now shifting to tangential jobs.
‘Economic earthquake’
“Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says most white-collar work “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” If that’s true, it’s an economic earthquake. We need a moratorium on new AI data centers to make sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote on X.
“Mustafa Suleyman just gave professionals their termination date. Microsoft AI’s CEO didn’t hedge. Lawyers, accountants, knowledge workers: most of what you do daily disappears within 12 to 18 months. Not transformed. Erased,” wrote another X user.
Grok told users that the cuts would likely apply to jobs such as administrative support (scheduling, data entry), basic accounting, customer service, content creation, legal research, and even some software coding. The chatbot insisted that a complete automation within 12 to 18 months was “ambitious” — insisting that many roles would evolve rather than disappear.