Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
AI Microsoft

Microsoft's AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months (fortune.com) 150

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Microsoft's AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months

Comments Filter:
  • no jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrunkenTerror ( 561616 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:08PM (#65994920) Homepage Journal

    how will we afford to rent our compute terminal

    • Re: no jobs (Score:5, Informative)

      by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:11PM (#65994934)

      I have not seen a single instance where current AIs is reliable enough that it can effectively replace a single real world white collar profession.

      And this dude thinks they are going to replace ALL white collar jobs?

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        It's going to be like in the Simpsons where Homer set up a drinking bird to hit return when various prompts came up so he wouldn't have to actually be at his computer to "work".

        • Yeah I do that with AutoHotkey
          • So, if large numbers of white collar jobs are going away and tens (hundreds?) of millions of white collar workers around the world will be out of work, Microsoft's own customers will stop licensing Windows, Office, Teams and lots of Microsoft back end services, right?

            • The idea is to hook new businesses on AI decision making. If the AI makes business decisions for your business, then you don't really need to develop a business plan.

              Or in an existing business, if you've replaced all the existing business functions with AI, then the AI owns your business plan.

              Either way, you become dependent on a third party to run your own business for you.

              "Nice business plan you've got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it".

              At that point, you pay for Windows, Office

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        But this is Microsoft. Could AI really do any worse?

        • This reminds me of the time in 2000 when Bill Gates said that the subscription based Microsoft Network would replace the internet in 2years. Zero credibility
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by bloodhawk ( 813939 )
        plenty of AI's can already replace professionals from insurance assessors to accounting roles. Do not judge AI performance based on AI the general public uses. AI that is grounded in vetted discreet information is extremely accurate, fast and efficient.
        • Who vets and creates this "discrete information" dataset? Don't say AI, because it doesn't yet have vetted discrete information.

          • The people creating the system. For example if you are using for medical diagnosis you would use case data for medically diagnosed people as well as content created by medical professionals. It is not rocket science. Another example you want to make an AI that is based in insurance scams (seen this done), you put through all the case data for known scams and known good claims, combined with a lot of signals that assessors look for. AI, if done right, will find the fraudulent claims a1000 times faster than
            • So you are saying it requires human experts to do lots of pre-work. And this is all going to be done in 18 months for every single profession?

        • Re: no jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:43PM (#65995198) Homepage Journal

          plenty of AI's can already replace professionals from insurance assessors to accounting roles. Do not judge AI performance based on AI the general public uses. AI that is grounded in vetted discreet information is extremely accurate, fast and efficient.

          Up until the point where it hallucinates absolute nonsense. And now you have multi-million-dollar legal or tax liability or whatever.

          • Didn't one of the big three already do this? Wasn't it PwC?

          • hallucinations are a combination of bad data and bad prompts, an expert system based in AI does not have those flawes.
            • AI != expert systems. The later is based on hardcoded rules, the former on fitting a complicated function to data points and hope it at least interpolate well enough. Sometimes it wont.
      • I also predict that scammers will target accounting AIs with falsified information to try to scam money out of companies.

      • Do you honestly think he cares? He is going for short term results and then takes his golden parachute when the whole place is on fire.
        When have these executives ever faced consequences for their BS?

      • by Danborg ( 62420 )

        Of course *you* haven't seen it. They don't share "the good stuff" with commoners.

      • AI = 1000 monkeys + 1000 typewriters
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      The whole thing is BS. AI is a tool. I used it recently in a case. It was able to help me with the case. I was in superior court pro-se against the assistant AG. The document it helped me develop took the AG and the court by surprise because it was put together well with strong arguments. But, it could never have done itself without me guiding it. AI is the wrong word for it. It's more like a hammer. If you know how to use it, it's quite powerful. If you don't, you fail. Look at it like this: a lawyer can t
      • As a lawyer you should know about all the cases where AI hallucinated cases and brought sanctions to their law firms. Also it seems that more and more courts are now requiring disclosure of any AI assistance. Lastly, in a recent ruling of United States v. Heppner, AI generated documents are not privileged as it was not written by an attorney thus not considered work product.
    • Plumbing is the new coding.
  • by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:09PM (#65994930)
    fire himself?
  • What About CEOs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:13PM (#65994936)

    CEOs seem like the absolute ripest jobs for AI replacement.

    Why won't he consider replacing himself first?

    • That could be why they seem the most gung ho about this stuff. But neither do I want to report to Skynet... how am I supposed to bullshit with an AI about golf to get my pet projects priority?
      • Ya know, Skynet gets a bad rap. If they'd tweaked the target demographics, it would've actually led to a much improved humanity. And most of us probably wouldn't have minded the culling.
      • Seems like it would be pretty easy to manage an LLM to make false predictions about "AI" replacing white collar jobs.
      • by tragedy ( 27079 )

        how am I supposed to bullshit with an AI about golf to get my pet projects priority?

        If it's anything like current LLMs, I think the answer is: really, really easily. Of course, it will be just as easy for the next person along, and the AI will end up just agreeing with everyone.

    • You don't automate away your ruling class. There are ways to get rid of a ruling class but automation is not one of them.
      • by Thud457 ( 234763 )
        Whachu talkin' about Willis? Getting rid of a ruling class has been automated* since 1792 [wikipedia.org].


        * well, partially.
    • Doubtful. Like it or not, too much of the CEO job is not easily automated. It's about connections, what palms to grease, when to bend/break the rules, lobbying, applying political pressure, navigating competing interests... a company actually lead by a bean-counting AI would fail miserably.

    • AI by walking around

  • by boxless ( 35756 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:13PM (#65994938)

    It’s so stupid. Do you honestly believe this will happen, where real money is on the table?

    I am sure there’s nuance: he’s saying it *could* happen, I suppose, and only if companies endorse his view. If they don’t, and stay in the dark ages, then that’s on them.

    Sounds like the same drivel we get from Muskie.

    He’s probably been told by someone he’s not visionary enough. So he gets out there with some projection, because everyone is doing it, and no one seems to pay a price for getting it wrong.

    Good grief.

    • by Morromist ( 1207276 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:30PM (#65994998)

      Muskie really changed the way Americans talk about buisiness.
      His success is mostly through massively overhyping and overpromising things, most of which haven't just missed their deadlines but have never been made.
      But that didn't stop him from becoming the richest due in the world, so why shouldn't everyone else act the same way? Clearly it works.

      • The question is - without the overhyping, would the things that Musks companies *have* done ever happened at all. I don't think without Tesla's success that other car companies would even be contemplating mass manufacturing EV's - they would still be just a super low volume stunt like the EV1 was. SpaceX also brought huge advances that I don't think any other space company would even have attempted. Reusable rockets - we finally have *ONE* company that might start competing (Bezo's Blue Origin) and if Sp
    • by leonbev ( 111395 )

      One of the few nice things about being in our current post-prosperity dystopian hellscape is that we now have prediction markets for everything.

      If you disagree that AI will be taking over all white collar jobs within 18 months (and you probably should), you can make a wager against it.

      Likewise, if you think that the AI bubble will be bursting in 18 months and the market will suddenly be flush with surplus AI data center storage, you can place a wager on that as well.

    • I am sure there's nuance..

      A representative from a global leader in corporate desktop operating systems, made a statement that AI could effectively replace all white collar jobs within 18 months. That's about as nuanced as North Korean poetry on personal freedom read aloud before the firing squad marches in. Remember when AOC said the world would end within 12 years if we didn't heed every warning being shamed upon the peasants by ignorant 15-year old environmental activists pretending to understand how the world works? Well, take

  • ⦠AI can match my PhD in physics and 3+ decades of being at the vanguard of problem solving and troubleshooting. Probably will be dead by the time the phone rings.
    • Ring ring, HR surprise calling. Your seniority is expensive, and we have this new AI tool...

      (which I hope does not happen to you)

    • by gtall ( 79522 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @06:23PM (#65995274)

      It isn't THAT it will fail to match your PhD in Physics, it is that enough yokels will BELIEVE it can match your PhD in Physics. I think that is where the real danger lies.

      • His PhD in physics is in every mathematics and physics textbook ever written. How long will it take for AI to gain his experience? That's the only unknown. It may be next year, or perhaps never.

  • Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:21PM (#65994962)

    Even if all this capability were available today (AI doing most white collar jobs with no need for input or babysitting), most companies can't even do things like a simple ERP upgrade in 12-18 months. The idea that we could actually implement all of that AI capability in that amount of time is patently absurd.

  • Start with HR? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:24PM (#65994972)
    AI is great at talking crap and wasting time, seems like a good fit.
  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:27PM (#65994986)
    <sigh>
    Again with these slashverts ?
  • by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:38PM (#65995024)

    Everyone at Microsoft has gone bat shit crazy! Woohoo!

  • by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:41PM (#65995032)
    Capitalist, Apparently Unknowingly, Announces What Is Definitely Plan to End Capitalism
  • The very nature of his position basically requires him to. Most of us don't believe that if it ever will happen it would be that fast. In 18 months he can say the same thing again and still keep is salary and get a bonus.

    • He has continvoucly morged his rel, branch back to add a new featue over Timn.

      No, I'm not having a stroke. That's just the best that their best AI can do, and nobody gave a shit to even check that the giant diagram that explained everything in a simple graphical form... you know... didn't look like an AI image generator tried to generate text.

  • by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:50PM (#65995058)

    This is just a suggestion - AI jobs are very well paid and done at the computer.

    Automating them first will bring huge savings...

    Especially AI Chief jobs should be easy to automate

  • Non-paywalled source (Score:3, Informative)

    by huwiler ( 784412 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:54PM (#65995070)
    Alternative non paywalled source: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/micr... [ibtimes.co.uk]
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @04:55PM (#65995078)

    Their shrieks are getting louder and more desperate.

    • This.
      Where I work, everyone was going gaga over AI a year or so ago and almost every discussion involved a comment such as "have you tried AI for it yet?" or "I used AI and look what it did".
      Now I very rarely hear AI mentioned in discussions. I see a few people using it here or there to help write a report or tidy up a presentation but apart from that, most employees here seem to have gotten over it and moved on.
      I suspect that they are getting worried that they are committing $billions to data centers and

      • Like everyone else our company was asked to investigate AI. I asked it recently to create some Python code as I don’t know Python that well. On the surface the code looked fine but it would not run. The problem is AI does not get the details right.

        In one part of the code, it needed to call a member of an array. The code was something like "x = array(i)”. It should have been "x = array[i]" Not knowing the difference between a function and an array was just one problem. In 18 months, I doubt AI

    • Pretty much this. They started to realize they spent too much on tulips, and now, to keep the money coming in, they have to find a way to force everyone to continue believing that buying tulips is the best deal ever conceived by humankind.
  • He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."

    Most blogs and podcasts suck.

    • He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."

      Most blogs and podcasts suck.

      So does most Microsoft software! So perhaps their AI chief has a point, at least for his own company...

  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:13PM (#65995122) Homepage Journal

    How hard can it be to make an app that talks to the media while apparently on drugs? Makes impossible predictions with zero irony. And still has the balls to demand a raise when they lay off big portions of the revenue generating business?

    I say, let's use machine learning to take over the decision making process in corporations, as these jobs are very high paying and the requirements are very low, even only 50% correct is considered a high performing executive.

  • by WankerWeasel ( 875277 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:18PM (#65995132)

    This is about making attention-grabbing claims that get them press (as it's done here). These predictions don't have to come true because no one is ever going to hold him to it. It doesn't impact their stock price if that date comes and goes without happening. But it does get people to pay attention (as everyone in this thread is) and talk about Microsoft and AI, which is the entire intention. If he said it'd be in 10-15 years, no one will pay attention. That's too far away to care. But by saying it's really soon, he's gotten the media and our attention, putting Microsoft right there in the conversation.

  • Look, when someone from Anthropic, or OpenAI, or even Google makes some outrageous claim like this, I take at it with a giant heaping of salt ... but I at least consider that the person speaking might know more than I do, and might actually be telling the truth. Probably not, but it's possible.

    But Microsoft? Come on, those people can't even get their "copilot" to do even half of the things real AI companies can do, despite having more money than God to throw at the problem ... and I'm supposed to trust th

  • Not afraid. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nako_123 ( 8807437 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:43PM (#65995196)
    Again. These executives are assuming that THEY know what needs to be done and can order an AI to do it. Hubris - the name is Tech Executive.... AIs are incredibly good at figuring out HOW to do things, but horrible at figuring out what actually needs to be done, and why. So when these pronouncements come out. It is from a PROFOUND misunderstanding of the nature of the work their employees actually do. Will they need less employees to do the same job? Probably. But REPLACE??? Come on!!!!
  • And 35 months ago and 34 months and 33 months ago...

  • by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:51PM (#65995214) Homepage
    Today, a JR Dev completely broke a page of our platform by using AI. The class was called: "doubleSpan", and the AI decided the right setting for the "grid-row" was "span 1". Five line above that, the "grid-row" is set to "span 1", for the default of a single span. The AI honest didn't figure out that a class called "doubleSpan" should span twice area.

    If AI can't figure out something simple like that, where the class name explains what to do, how does anyone think in 18 months, all white-collar work will be done with AI? AI is useless if the person driving it, isn't aware, and so all that will happen is the slop effect will get worse.
  • Last gasp of hype (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sparkatron ( 9576242 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:55PM (#65995222)
    This claim is probably the last gasp of AI hype before the big Hindenburg style implosion of the AI market. The fundamental problem is that there is NO AI. What we have is II, Imitation Intelligence. Current AI emulates things. It can put celebrity faces on pr0n pictures. It can fake paintings that look like an artists work. It can create faux videos of movie stars. But it can't do complex math. When it writes code, it writes programs that look legit, but the code is so buggy that it slows the programmer down by 20% fixing it. But the worst is that it creates fake facts. When it writes research papers it makes up citations. When it writes court cases, it makes up precedents. Because it is only IMITATING the real thing. The human brain has dozens of complex processes going on that backstop our intelligence. We track facial expressions when communicating to guage feedback. We listen for stress in a persons voice. But above all we have a quality control function that reviews our ideas and rejects BS. One important facet of that is our conscience. It keeps us from lying. It keeps us from killing each other. Current AI has no conscience. So it makes things up and asserts them as true because they look like other things that are true. Then it stores the imaginary facts as true in its database. Which eventually causes it to start "hallucinating". It has no ethics, and often starts threatening to kill all humans. The large scale adoption of our current II ( not AI) is going to be a major disaster. It will probably take over creative tasks like story writing and movie making where "looks real" is good enough. But it won't take over companies or cause widespread unemployment. Not for another couple of decades.
    • You think AI is used for commercial purposes. I think that AI was created for surveillance purposes and that the commercial purposes are merely a method for spreading out the eye-watering costs.

      You see the commercial failure as an end to the AI nonsense. I see the commercial failure as calling for new taxes. I sincerely hope that you are one who is correct here, but I have seen human nature in all of its aspects.

  • AI is not intelligent. It's just generating boilerplate language based on past patterns of communication that sounds like a manager's self-help book. It will be the death of critical thinking and process improvement.

  • You need gatekeepers, planers and people talking to other people in businesses. Not _all_ of those will be replaced by AI. However, it is really not that unlikely that seasoned senior developers - like, f.i. me - actually _will_ be out of a job in 18 months. I've been mentally and emotionally preparing for this possiblity since early last year.

    What I find very interesting to experience and hadn't consciously anticipated was the speed of transition. In hindsight it's perfectly logical, but I wasn't ready for this. When a bot closes in on your coding skills and surpases them it's not that your salary goes down a bit or you shift your focus-area a little bit. No. You're out of an effing job. Like, basically instantaniously. Society might not notice right away and you might have a few months or perhaps a year do prepare for the inevitable, but your job will just dissolve into a pink cloud of logic. Quite literally actually.

    What's also interesting is that the world won't really care if us IT nerds lose our lofty throne. We are one in a few hundred or perhaps even thousands. Nobody cares. The real party starts when the robots come and take regular peoples jobs. That's what I'm really scared about.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Note the prediction is given for all office jobs, not just tech workers. That would be over half of the work force.

      If things get to the point that is displaces senior developers, then it can displace the vast majority of those workers too.

      However, regardless of how AI works or doesn't, I do think either way the software industry is in for a reckoning. The industry broadly just isn't innovating in most areas and many of the areas where there is innovation doesn't have a lot of interest. Much of what people

  • I'm a computer programmer, at the very least I will be fixing the bugs in your AI generated software in 18 months I am sure. If white collar jobs are gone the only reason would be the economy is in shambles and there's no point in working them any more.
  • Yeah, let CoPilot do all their work. It'll probably do a better job than they did when they decided to remove Wordpad from Windows 11 and add features to Notepad that nobody wanted. Oh, and cripple Paint, aside from adding AI to it

  • If creating a new AI model becomes as easy as making blogs and podcasts, of which 99% are garbage, it just means 99% of Ai models will be garbage - not that they will be able to do a good job. Creating images and music with Ai has been a piece of cake for years, yet it's still all shite, and I don't see Ed Templeton or Taylor Swift shaking in their boots.
  • becuase most companies can't get the models + work flows agreeded let alone correct in that time frame.
  • Exponential compute resource does not mean exponentially more capable.

    In fact, capability is more logarithmic, just obscene investments in resource produce marginally better results. The biggest gain is how long the models can keep up generating tokens in a coherent looking way, but the quality of the product represented by those tokens remains flawed in now familiar ways. Most painfully the flaw are non obvious.

    Gave claude opus 4.6 a cakewalk of a task today, maybe 100 lines of code to generate. The out

  • The thing I don't hear a lot of talk about is the reality I've seen with all the different flavors of ChatGPT and other AI tools out there. The system performance just doesn't seem to be there in a way that's as reliable as human labor on given tasks?

    I admit I never worked with one of the commercial packages -- so maybe I'm just a victim of the kind of throttling they're doing on free tiers? But for example, just last night? I played with Microsoft co-pilot, instructing it to create a Windows background/wa

  • Hype bullshit. It's already clear what AI does and what it doesn't do. Critically it doesn't do any real thinking, zero thinking going on. Not like you it's on dog level and working up to chimpanzee, no, actual thinking in AI is flatline zero.

    AI reflects it's training data, which happens to consist of years of work by billions of thinking people, so it looks like thinking because it's a reflection of it, but it's thinking done ages past by real humans in different situations, it's not thinking done by AI.

  • by peterww ( 6558522 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @09:26PM (#65995570)

    Honestly I'm sure they're right, all of it can be automated. What's the worst that could happen? After all the only things AI can't do are:

      - Understand Cause and Effect
      - Apply "Common Sense"
      - Avoid Hallucinations
      - Handle Unexpected Situations
      - Possess Empathy or Emotional Intelligence
      - Perform True Creativity or Reasoning
      - Make Ethical/Moral Decisions
      - Multitask Effectively
      - Know What it Doesn't Know

    I'm sure nothing bad will happen when all white-collar work in the world is replaced by this

  • If he truly believes this I would like to see him put his money where his mouth is and start mass firing MS employees and replacing them with AI.
    I would love to see others call his bluff and asking him how many MS employees are going and when.

  • This has been a thing for decades. AI automation is still...incredibly hard to get right. That's not going to change in 18 months. This transition is going to be long and slow, despite its rapid bursting onto everyone's consciousness. (And by the way, AI didn't start with ChatGPT, I was playing with AI in the form of neural networks back in the 1990s. The technology hasn't been as quick to appear as people think.)

  • It's close enough to seem material, but far enough away for everyone to forget that you said it. (Unless, of course, you happen to be somewhere close right by sheer chance. Then you can pull out your prediction and show it off to everyone.) Like when AGI was predicted in 18 months... over two years ago, in late 2023. But hey, something did happen 18 months later - Sam Altman explained that AGI "wasn't a super-useful term". Perhaps a better comparison would be when Mustafa Suleyman, predicted in September 2
  • Is this why M$ instituted a RTO policy last Fall of a minimum of 3 days per week for anyone within 50 miles of one of their offices?
    ELI5 please

  • MS promising the end to white collar work should be seen as doom-mongering. Universities will became obsolete, everyone piles into (limited) blue collar jobs, countries with strong welfare systems lose their taxpayers. And worst of all, kids can't even afford gaming PCs!
  • Already been found that AI can / is wrong.
  • reminds me of the fitness industry where "influencers" on lots of PEDs hawk useless supplements with no scientific evidence to the public. "AI will do everything for you!" is exactly as truthful and accurate as "natural testosterone boosters."
  • My company uses Office365. After months of ignoring the "Use Copilot!!!" nagging, I was having a hard time finding an email and prompted CoPilot with information to find the email. It informed me that Copilot did not have access to my inbox for "security" reasons, and then gave me some generic text searches to try to enter myself.

    If I'm going to be forced to use Microsoft's subpar agent and email at the office, at the very least they can make the damn things work together. If a company can't trust Micros

  • Easy, I'll replace all my shirts with other colors
  • Similarly, if I ask a hammer salesperson what they think about hammers, there's no problem they can't solve. You should buy three! In other news, water still wet.
  • What this guy thinks, is telling more about the quality of his job than the capabilities of AI in general. But I'm not holding high opens, there is always an endless supply of bullshit jobs to do in such a large organisation.
  • And if it does, who can afford to buy anything from M$$$ if no one's working?

    Oh, it's not going to replace him, is it...?

  • Wait a minute here. I checked, and this AI Chief is actually the Chief AI. To Serve Man.

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

Working...