What will the office work be like in five years' time? - Microsoft Voice

Imagine a typical Monday morning in the city's downtown skyline, with eight loud prints smelling like coffee and a kind of scented air and light from computer screens reflecting on the faces of office workers, each one grinning their heads to do his or her job firmly believing that skills and expertise they have acquired will protect their jobs for a long time to come...

But on the tower of technology far away Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's chief of staff overseeing AI is looking down at that image with a button pressed and starting counting backwards in numbers that make everyone pause: "12 to 18 months".

This is not a whistle, but the highest level of warning he declared that within just one to two and a half years from now most office work being done by humans will be made up of artificial intelligence or AI.

The surprise of this is the "speed" of an emerging storm, which was previously predicted by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, that it would take about five years to bring down its operating structure and crush it for five... It sounds like enough time to prepare a lifeboat and livelihood suit. Microsoft said the storm wasn't far away at all; it was already hanging out in front of our office doorstep.

The answer is "everyone sitting in front of a computer". In the past, we may have thought robots would break down jobs at factories but this time the target has become a paid group of people who use creativity and logic, lawyers who used to hang out reading thousands of pages of documents, accountants who leaned on numbers in Excel lists, marketing managers who kept busy with attractive campaigns or even project managers who kept busy schedules... They are being stalked by challengers who never work days without holidays and never ask for any more money.

The challenger was given the title "Professional-grade AGI" or professional level AI.

It's not just Chatbot that answers robotic questions, but it is a replacement capable of handling almost all the boring routines of humans and if we ignore shots in just 2-3 years time, large offices will be filled with "AI Agents" who look like idle employees. They can manage complex workflows, cross-departmental projects, and make decisions to take human places efficiently and seamlessly

Some may argue that but creating AI is too difficult for ordinary people to access. That was true in the past, because in the near future building and trending an AI model specifically for yourself or a company will become as simple as hosting a podcast or writing a blog post complaining about superfluous stuff everyone has an AI personal assistant perfectly tailored to meet particular needs

By this point, the bedtime tale that technology companies used to tell us about "AI created to help people not replace people" had begun in the autumn.

The masks of goodwill have been removed, and giants like Amazon and Meta are moving forward with late layoffs, while explicitly acknowledging that these layoffs "are AI related".

Although in the dark corner of a boardroom, many financial analysts look back and say that AI may actually be just "a good-looking scapegoat" for companies lacking capital or wanting to cut costs rather than admitting they themselves are managing wrongly, this does not change the fact that... office seats continue to decline.

So what is a Microsoft attack doing in the midst of this crisis?

Deep down, Microsoft knows that borrowing someone else's nose is not the way to win even though they are tightly tied in with OpenAI. But at the same time, behind-the-scenes Microsoft is accelerating its own quiet and powerful AI army; the ultimate goal is to reduce reliance on OpenAI and build a "fortress of technological stability" where it is only one owner of the bed.

The clock keeps going, and the warning from Mustafa Suleyman is not a threat to create terror but an alarm that warns us to wake up.

12 to 18 months may sound short and startling, but it's also a time... when you have the choice of sitting down and waiting for an AI to take your seat or getting up and learning how to be "the boss" who controls those AIs himself.

Let's turn a simple desk into the command base where you and AI work together more comfortably and focused than ever before: http://magazineasp.com/go/ergonomic

The order of the athipat sirikaew.

Sources of reference are:

Fortune Interview with Mustafa Suleyman on AI, human-level work and office automation in 1218 months

https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/when-will-ai-kill-white-collar-office-jobs-18-months-microsoft-mustafa-suleyman/

Yahoo Finance Summary of Suleyman's interview with the Financial Times about a 1218 month timeline for white-collar job automation

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ai-chief-sets-two-235739710.html

Axios Summarize Dario Amodei's warning that AI could eliminate entry-level white collar jobs by half within 15 years

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic