Amid the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and ongoing layoffs across industries, Microsoft AI chief executive officer (CEO) Mustafa Suleyman has warned that AI will replace a significant share of white-collar jobs within the next 12 to 18 months.
Suleyman cautioned that the impact will extend beyond coders and software engineers to professionals such as lawyers, accountants, project managers, and marketing executives.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Suleyman said: “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.”
He further added that AI agents are expected to coordinate more effectively within the workflows of large institutions over the next two to three years. These AI tools will continue to learn and improve over time, taking increasingly autonomous actions.
Microsoft pursuing “true self-sufficiency” in AI
To keep pace with AI’s rapid evolution, Microsoft is pursuing what Suleyman described as “true self-sufficiency” in AI by developing its own powerful foundation models and reducing reliance on OpenAI.
“We have to develop our own foundation models, which are at the absolute frontier, with gigawatt-scale compute and some of the very best AI training teams in the world,” Suleyman told the Financial Times. Microsoft is investing heavily in assembling and organising the vast datasets required to train advanced AI systems.
In a bid to sharpen its competitive edge, Microsoft is also investing in other model developers such as Anthropic and Mistral. According to Suleyman, the company has accelerated development of its own in-house models, with a launch expected sometime this year.
Microsoft has forecast capital expenditure of $140 billion in its fiscal year ending in June, as it ramps up spending on the infrastructure required to build advanced AI systems.
Microsoft plans AI expansion in healthcare
He added that Microsoft’s broader goal is to develop “humanist superintelligence,” ensuring that AI technologies remain under human control. This stance comes amid growing concerns that rival AI labs are racing to build increasingly powerful systems that may resist oversight by their creators.
Suleyman said: “These tools, like any other past technology, are designed to enhance human wellbeing and serve humanity, not exceed humanity”, reported Financial Times.
