It’s not just coders — all kinds of white-collar work could be automated by the middle of next year.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made a bold prediction about the near-term future of professional work. Rather than focusing on the abstract concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence, Suleyman offered a more concrete and immediate timeline: AI will achieve human-level performance on most professional tasks within 12 to 18 months.
When asked to explain the difference between AGI and superintelligence, Suleyman reframed the question entirely. “I prefer the definition that focuses first on what would it take to build a system that could achieve most of the tasks that a regular professional in a workplace goes about on a daily basis,” he said. “Think of it as a professional grade AGI.”
The Microsoft AI chief didn’t hold back on his timeline. “I think that we’re going to have 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 AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Suleyman pointed to software engineering as an early indicator of this transformation. “We can see this in software engineering. Many software engineers report that they are now using AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production, which means that their role shifted now to this meta function of debugging, scrutinizing, doing the strategic stuff, like architecting, putting things into production. So it’s a quite different relationship to the technology, and that’s happened in the last six months.”
Suleyman isn’t the only person who has predicted such an outcome. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly been saying that AI will wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will impact white-collar and creative jobs first.
The implications of Suleyman’s prediction are staggering. If accurate, his timeline suggests that the entire landscape of knowledge work could fundamentally transform before the end of 2026. This isn’t about AI as a helpful assistant — it’s about AI performing the core functions of professional roles that have traditionally required years of education and training. The shift he describes among software engineers, where the job becomes more about oversight and strategic direction rather than execution, could become the template for how lawyers review contracts, accountants process financial data, and marketers develop campaigns. This aligns with broader industry trends: companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have been releasing increasingly capable models at a rapid pace, with each iteration showing marked improvements in reasoning, task completion, and domain expertise. If Suleyman’s timeline proves correct, businesses and professionals alike have little more than a year to prepare for a workplace transformation unlike anything seen since the dawn of the computer age.