'Within 18 months, AI will be able to do most office work'. The prophecy of the head of Microsoft AI

Mustafa Suleyman raises the most radical prophecy of the AI era: within 18 months much of the 'desk' work could be automated. In an interview with the Financial Times, the head of Microsoft's AI section spoke of 'human-level' performance on the majority of professional tasks, pointing to accounting, legal, marketing and even project management as exposed areas. A message that, in fact, reopens a very delicate topic, because it raises important doubts about the future of many office jobs.

Suleyman's argument rests on a technical premise: the exponential growth of computing power as a signal that models will be able to write code better than most programmers, and by extension perform repeatable tasks that today take up hours in front of a computer. The tone is the one already heard in the 2025 round of warnings: Dario Amodei (Anthropic) had evoked the risk of halving entry-level white-collar jobs; Jim Farley (Ford) had spoken of a similar cut in employees in the United States; and the echo was rekindled with Elon Musk claiming in Davos that AGI (general artificial intelligence) could arrive as early as this year.

The point, however, is the gap between apocalyptic timelines and operational reality. So far, the impact of AI in professional services appears more incremental than substitutive: lawyers, accountants and auditors are mainly using it for targeted tasks such as document review and routine analysis, with productivity gains described as marginal. And in some cases the effect even seems to be the opposite: a METR study on software developers found that AI can lengthen execution times, making certain tasks take about 20 per cent longer.

Yet indications of dislocation are beginning to appear. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas (an American consultancy specialising in the labour market) some 55,000 cuts in 2025 would be AI-related. And even when companies avoid explicitly attributing reductions to technology, the internal narrative always leads in the same direction, with CEOs (like Nadella) talking about a 'new era'. In all of this, the markets are also reacting: the recent selloff in software stocks, dubbed the 'SaaSpocalypse', stems precisely from the fear that 'agentic' systems could absorb functions now sold as software-as-a-service.

Within this framework, Suleyman's statements also have a second level, namely that of Microsoft's industrial planning. Suleyman said he wanted to aim for 'superintelligence' and above all to reduce dependence on OpenAI, by building proprietary models. The promise is that AI will become a design commodity.