- Most white-collar jobs may be automated by AI within 12 to 18 months, says Microsoft AI chief
- Jobs like document inspection, financial analysis, and marketing will be fully automated soon
- AI-assisted coding now handles most software code, letting engineers focus on complex tasks
Most white-collar jobs may be automated by artificial intelligence (AI) in the next 12 to 18 months, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has warned.
These include jobs that currently take up a significant number of professional workloads, such as document inspection, financial analysis, compliance checks, marketing optimisation, scheduling, and customer communication, he told Financial Times.
“White collar work where you are sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer, an accountant, 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 stated, citing software engineering as an early example.
According to the Microsoft AI chief, AI-assisted coding tools now handle most of the code generation, allowing engineers to concentrate on higher-level activities like system architecture, debugging, verification, and deployment.
The developments in "professional-grade" AI systems are drastically altering the way knowledge workers function, Suleyman said.
He said such systems may carry out the majority of tasks at work at a human level, making a distinction between artificial general intelligence (AGI) and what he called "superintelligence."
“I prefer the definition that focuses first on what it takes to build a system that could achieve most of the tasks that a regular professional in a workplace goes about on a daily basis. Think of it as a professional-grade AGI,” Suleyman expressed.
Suleyman asserted that the standard for human-level performance is approaching more quickly than expected in several professional domains. “I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most if not all professional tasks,” he said.
Watch the full conversation here:
According to Suleyman, AI will redefine employment rather than completely replace it. Professionals may go from carrying out tasks directly to strategic and managerial positions, which include controlling exceptions, establishing goals, and assessing AI outputs.
