Microsoft AI CEO: Virtually All White Collar Tasks Will Be Automated Within a Year and a Half

""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," Suleyman said."

""Many software engineers report that they are now using AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production," Suleyman said in the interview, "which means that their roles shifted now to this meta function of debugging, scrutinizing, of doing the strategic stuff like architecting," and "putting things into production.""

AI models are on the verge of achieving human-level performance on most professional tasks. Projections indicate that most white-collar work performed at computers—law, accounting, project management, marketing—could be fully automated within 12 to 18 months. The release of Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI agent contributed to a stock market selloff amid investor fears about automation and threats to software vendors' revenue. Software engineering already shows heavy AI integration: many engineers use AI-assisted coding for the majority of code, shifting roles toward debugging, scrutiny, strategic architecture, and production. Microsoft claims over a quarter of its code is written with AI. Quality of AI outputs remains uncertain.

Read at Futurism