Microsoft AI Chief Says Artificial Intelligence Will Do Most White-Collar Work by Next Year
Microsoft AI Chief Says Artificial Intelligence Will Do Most White-Collar Work by Next Year
Publish Date: 2026-02-14 11:30:00
Source Domain: www.westernjournal.com
Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence appears to be here to stay.
And for white-collar workers, they may have a very good reason to hate it — at least according to a top Microsoft executive.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman shared some sobering thoughts on where artificial intelligence is headed.
Suleyman believes that AI will be advanced, sophisticated, and widespread enough that it will replace white-collar workers within 18 months.
“I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” Suleyman said, per Business Insider.
He added, “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.”
CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman joins FT editor Roula Khalaf to explain why most of the tasks accountants, lawyers and other professionals currently undertake will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months https://t.co/yYKzS7NIOP pic.twitter.com/HvA6Q7KgIc
— Financial Times (@FT) February 12, 2026
Suleyman said that this development is already observable in more specialized tasks, like software engineering, which have already seen heavy and growing AI usage.
“It’s a quite different relationship to the technology, and that’s happened in the last six months,” he said.
These sorts of prognostications from Microsoft shouldn’t be surprising.
After all, the tech titan’s investment into AI has already cost a number of jobs.
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