Microsoft AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman has a grim warning for every office worker- Within 18 months…

Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman has predicted that artificial intelligence will reach human-level performance across most professional tasks within 18 months, putting lawyers, accountants, marketers and project managers among those most at risk of displacement.

Speaking in a conversation with the Financial Times, Suleyman delivered one of the most precise and sweeping timelines yet from a major technology leader on the pace at which AI will reshape office work. The prediction has reignited a debate that has been building since early 2025, when a chorus of chief executives first began sounding the alarm on white-collar automation.

The Microsoft AI chief cited the exponential growth in computational power as a primary driver. As processing capacity advances, he argued, AI models will be able to write and review code better than most human programmers, with knock-on effects for a wide range of knowledge-based professions.

Suleyman also struck an unexpectedly democratising note on the future of AI deployment. "Creating a new model is going to be like creating a podcast or writing a blog," he said. "It is going to be possible to design an AI that suits your requirements for every institution, organisation, and person on the planet."

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Shumer have both written about what they described as alarm, and even personal sadness, at watching the technology they built rapidly render earlier work obsolete.

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, speaking at Davos in January, said he believed artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that matches or surpasses human-level intelligence, could arrive as early as this year.

Writing in The Atlantic, journalist Josh Tyrangiel argued the US was unprepared for the coming disruption, comparing the recent reticence of chief executives on the subject to seeing "a shark fin break the water."

In some documented cases, AI has made workers less productive rather than more. A study by the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research found that AI's impact on software developers actually caused tasks to take 20 per cent longer than they would have done without it.

Economic returns from AI investment also remain concentrated. Research by Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok found that while profit margins in large technology companies increased by more than 20 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2025, the broader Bloomberg 500 Index recorded almost no change.

Slok separately noted that "investors do not believe AI will result in higher earnings outside the tech sector," citing consensus Wall Street expectations for the S&P 500.

Financial markets have already begun pricing in the technology's disruptive potential. In February, software stocks suffered a significant sell-off driven by automation fears, which analysts termed the "SaaSpocalypse," referring to the software-as-a-service sector.

The sell-off followed announcements by Anthropic and OpenAI of agentic AI systems for enterprises, designed to perform many of the core functions previously carried out by SaaS organisations.

"This after all is the most important technology of our time," Suleyman said. "We have to develop our own foundation models which are at the absolute frontier."

Earlier warnings from other chief executives set the context for Suleyman's remarks. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei warned last May that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, though he has since moderated that position.

Ford chief executive Jim Farley said AI would cut in half the number of white-collar jobs across the US. MIT Technology Review featured Suleyman in April, in which he insisted that AI development would not hit a ceiling in the near term, even as accumulating evidence continues to complicate the most expansive predictions made about the technology's pace of disruption.