Most office jobs will be automated in 18 months, says Microsoft AI chief

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has already started revamping the job market in various ways. As companies restructure operations and rethink investment priorities, tech giants including Amazon, Meta, Oracle Corporation, and others have begun cutting jobs across their workforce. 

Now, Microsoft’s AI Chief, Mustafa Suleyman, predicts that many professional office jobs are very close to undergoing huge changes because of AI. And he also gives a timeline that all this could happen within the next 12 to 18 months. He told Financial Times that several “human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks” will soon be done by AI. 

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Suleyman further predicts that tasks that involve “sitting down at a computer” could be fully automated in the next 18 months. He named legal, marketing, and project management roles among the professions most vulnerable to AI-driven disruption. The statement marks one of the shortest automation timelines, signalling the rapid shift due to AI development.

Why are desk jobs at risk of being replaced by AI?

Suleyman further highlighted that computing capabilities are improving extremely fast, which supports the power and infrastructure used to train and run AI systems. This growth may serve as a warning that, as computing power improves, AI models may become more capable of managing complex human tasks.

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According to Suleyman, the disruption will extend far beyond basic automation into high-level professional work. He predicts two major things about the future of AI: first, he said that building AI could soon become easy for everyone, and it will be as easy as starting a podcast, creating a website, or writing a blog.

Right now, building advanced AI models requires huge amounts of money, computing power, and expert engineers. But Suleyman predicts future tools will make AI creation far more accessible.

Second, he said Microsoft wants to become self-reliant in AI. Suleyman said, “This after all is the most important technology of our time. We have to develop our own foundation models, which are at the absolute frontier.”