Microsoft’s AI chief says the automation of white-collar work is no longer a distant possibility.
In a new interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says artificial intelligence systems are rapidly approaching human-level performance across a wide range of professional tasks.
“I think that we’re going to have a 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, 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.”
He points to software engineering as an early signal of the shift already underway.
“And 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 has shifted now to this meta function of debugging, scrutinizing, and doing the strategic stuff like architecting, et cetera, et cetera, putting things into production. So it’s a quite different relationship to the technology. And that’s happened in the last six months.”
Independent research appears to support Suleyman’s prediction that white-collar automation is coming sooner than most people expect.
According to data published by the model evaluation group METR, Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50% time horizon of approximately 4 hours and 49 minutes on complex tasks, with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1 hour and 49 minutes to 20 hours and 25 minutes. METR says this is the highest published time horizon it has recorded to date.
The time horizon metric estimates how long an AI system can sustain coherent, goal-directed work before performance degrades. A nearly five-hour median suggests that frontier models are beginning to handle extended expert-level tasks that previously required sustained human effort.
A five-hour benchmark means AI can now handle mid-size code implementation, complex data analysis and structured research memo drafting.
METR’s chart also shows that the task length capability doubles every 196 days, or 6.5 months. If the curve holds, AI could handle multi-day workflows within 12–18 months, which likely eliminates the need for people to do technical work.
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