Most of the white collar jobs will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next one and a half year, claimed Microsoft AI Chief Executive Mustafa Suleyman, amid a frenzied environment over job cuts due to AI.
In a video interview with Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times, Suleyman claimed that the lightning advance of AI towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) stage, will happen in the next 12-18 months, thereby resulting in white collar jobs-lawyer, accountant, marketing/project manager etc-getting “automated” by an AI.
The comments made by Suleyman come amid concerns over job cuts due to AI and rising costs of compute training.
When asked how soon he can predict the arrival of AGI, Suleyman said, “I think we are gonna have a human level performance in most, if not all professional tasks. So white collar work where you are sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer, or an accountant or a project manager, or marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI in the next 12-18 months. And we can see this in software engineering already.”
With the advent of AI, the global workforce has already started to feel the brunt of the “automation wave”. According to a 2024 International Monetary Fund (IMF) report ‘Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the future of work’, 40% of global employment is exposed to AI, while the World Economic Forum 2025 report predicts 20% job disruption by 2030 with 78 million new jobs created (170 million created, 92 million displaced).
In his interview, Suleyman justified the rising expenditure over training AI models.
“Over the last 15 years there has been a 1$trillion fold increase in training compute and in the next 3 years, there will be a further 1000x increase.
And today as a result, we have models that can code better than the vast majority of the human coders, maybe even all of them. That’s pretty unprecedented and it justifies unprecedented spending,” said Suleyman.
While the abilities of AI remain undisputed in the tech and policy corridors, it remains to be seen whether Suleyman’s 18 month window turns into a ground reality.
Several studies and surveys have reported “jagged edge” of AI adoption where a few companies see higher ROI while others find it difficult to use AI in their workspace. A 2025 Future of Professionals Report by Reuters has reported only marginal gains by AI in early stages by lawyers and accountants.
