AI Countdown Begins: White-Collar Jobs Under Massive Threat

The threat of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is looming large sending jitters down the spines of thousands of employees, techies in particular, as tech companies are going for layoffs at a brisk pace.

Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman affirmed the fears and even predicted a precise timeline for it to reshape office work. AI will reach human-level performance across most professional tasks within 18 months, he said.

Suleyman also outlined a longer-term ambition. He said his central mission is to achieve “superintelligence” and that Microsoft intends to reduce its dependence on OpenAI by developing its own independent foundation models.

Speaking to a leading English newspaper, he said that AI would put lawyers, accountants, marketers and project managers at risk. In the next year or 18 months, a majority of tasks involving sitting down at a computer would be fully automated by AI.

Human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks, would be taken over by AI. AI will have the capabilities to handle most of the white-collar tasks being done by humans before 2027.

Suleyman said exponential growth in computational power is the main reason behind white-collar automation. As processing capacity advances, AI models would be able to write and review code better than most human programmers.

Creating a new model is going to be like creating a podcast or writing a blog. He said it would be possible to design an AI that suits requirements of every institution, organization, and person on the planet. He believes AI is moving from assisting humans to replacing parts of their work altogether.

In the next 2-3 year, AI agents could begin handling workflows inside companies, coordinating work and making decisions with negligible human involvement, he said.