For the back half of the 20th century (what Fortune founder Henry Luce called “The American Century”), MBA and law degree programs were a ticket to a great office job and a path to the American Dream. The 21st century is asking the question: What happens when all those office jobs get automated?
In a conversation with the Financial Times earlier this year, the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, delivered another in a series of predictions from AI leaders that white-collar work is on the precipice of a radical transformation thanks to AI. His timeline is 18 months until those law school and MBA grads—and many less-credentialed peers—are out of luck.
Suleyman predicted “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” being done by AI. Most tasks that involve “sitting down at a computer” will be fully automated by AI within the next year or 18 months, he said, naming accounting, legal, marketing, and even project management as vulnerable. Suleyman’s warning echoed the viral essay of the week, a version of which was published at Fortune.com, by AI researcher Matt Shumer, who compared this moment to February 2020, when the pandemic was about to hit America. This will be more dramatic, though, Shumer said.
Suleyman cited the exponential growth in computational power as a flashing red signal that AI could replace large swaths of professionals. As “compute” advances, he said, models will be able to code better than most human coders. Shumer and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both written about their alarm, even sadness, at watching their life’s work rapidly grow obsolete.
If Suleyman’s warning sounds familiar, that’s because it was the tune of early 2025, when many CEOs issued similarly apocalyptic prophecies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last May AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs (though recently changed his tune). Ford CEO Jim Farley said AI would cut in half the number of white-collar jobs in the U.S.
In The Atlantic, Josh Tyrangiel argued the U.S. wasn’t prepared for the coming AI disruption, comparing CEOs’ recent silence on the subject to seeing “a shark fin break the water.”
But that drumbeat is beginning again, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying in Davos in January that he thinks artificial general intelligence—AI that matches or exceeds human-level intelligence—could arrive as early as this year.
However, as AI experts hypothesize about when, and if, AI will disrupt white-collar work, the technology thus far has made only a small splash in professional services. A 2025 Thomson Reuters report found lawyers, accountants, and auditors are experimenting with AI for targeted tasks like document review and routine analysis. But while the results have shown marginal productivity improvements, they fall short of signaling mass job displacement.
In fact, in some instances, AI has had the reverse effect: making workers less productive. A recent study from nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) on AI’s impact on software developers found the technology actually made the workers’ tasks take 20% longer.
Any returns the economy is seeing are largely confined to the tech industry, suggesting that AI disruption has been limited in the real economy. Recent research from Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok found that while profit margins in Big Tech increased by more than 20% in the fourth quarter of 2025, the broader Bloomberg 500 Index has seen almost no change. A few days earlier, Slok had 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.
Still, there are early signs AI is leading to job displacement. About 49,135 job cuts so far this year were AI-related, according to employment consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. While not citing AI as a reason for cuts, Microsoft last year let go 15,000 workers. In a memo released last July following job eliminations, CEO Satya Nadella said the company must “reimagine our mission for a new era.”
Despite marginal workforce reductions, the markets are reacting violently to the technology’s potential. In February, software stocks suffered a huge selloff out of fears of automation (analysts dubbed it the “SaaSpocalypse,” for the software-as-a-service sector). The selloff came after Anthropic and OpenAI announced the launch of agentic AI systems for enterprises that perform many of the key functions of SaaS organizations.
Suleyman is adamant about the technology’s potential. He thinks organizations will be able to retrofit the technology to perform any required job function, enhancing productivity across white-collar industries. “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, organization, and person on the planet.”
Suleyman said his core mission as the steward of Microsoft AI is to achieve “superintelligence.” The CEO wants to achieve AI self-sufficiency and reduce its reliance on OpenAI, instead prioritizing the construction of the company’s independent models.
“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.”
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Feb. 13, 2026.
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