India’s IT sector is staring at one of its most turbulent phases in recent memory. A sharp correction in technology stocks has been triggered by rising fears that artificial intelligence (AI) could render many core roles redundant. At the heart of this anxiety is a stark warning from AI leaders — a 12-month deadline may loom over large swathes of white-collar employment.
Death knell sounding for jobs?
The most dramatic articulation of this disruption has come from Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. In a recent interview with The Financial Times, Suleyman argued that most tasks performed in white-collar professions could be fully automated within the next 12 to 18 months.
According to him, office-based roles such as lawyers, accountants and project managers, the jobs that primarily involve working at a computer, are particularly vulnerable. He claimed that existing AI models can already code better than the vast majority of human programmers, “maybe even all of them to date.” This is not a distant, theoretical forecast. It is presented as an imminent transformation, unfolding in real time.
Suleyman described Microsoft’s work on what he termed “professional grade AGI”, which means AI systems engineered to carry out everyday knowledge-worker tasks with reliability and scale. He suggested that a significant portion of computer-based office work could be automated in the next year to year and a half.
He also offered a striking analogy about the future of AI model creation. Building AI models, he said, could soon become as routine and accessible as launching a podcast or writing a blog. Rather than remaining the exclusive domain of specialist engineers, institutions and individuals would be able to design AI tailored to their own operational needs. Within two to three years, he projected, AI agents could manage complex workflows across large organisations, coordinating tasks that currently require teams of professionals.
Workforce cuts and corporate pivots
These predictions are not occurring in isolation. They coincide with a broader wave of AI-driven restructuring across global corporations. US-based cloud services company Salesforce reportedly eliminated up to 1,000 roles this month as part of a more aggressive pivot toward artificial intelligence. Similar workforce reductions have been reported at major technology and logistics firms in recent weeks, reinforcing investor concerns that automation is accelerating faster than labour markets can adjust.
In India, where IT services form a critical pillar of the economy and employ millions, such developments have amplified market anxieties. Investors fear that if AI can independently code, manage workflows and deliver enterprise solutions, then traditional outsourcing models may face structural disruption.
“Software engineering will be obsolete”
Adding to the sense of urgency, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, made an even more direct claim at the World Economic Forum last month, setting off a 12-month countdown. He said software engineering as a profession could become obsolete within 12 months.
Amodei argued that the defining risk is not merely job loss but the pace of progress. In just two years, AI systems have advanced from struggling to produce a single line of functional code to generating entire programs used internally by engineers at his own firm. The speed of capability expansion, he suggested, makes workforce displacement a near-term reality rather than a distant possibility.
The transformation inside Anthropic itself illustrates this shift. At the Cisco AI Summit recently, the company’s Labs chief, Mike Krieger, told Jeetu Patel of Cisco that the company’s AI model Claude is now effectively writing its own updates. “Claude is now writing Claude,” he said, describing development processes where most products are now almost entirely generated by the AI system itself, supported by carefully constructed scaffolding to ensure trust and oversight.
This internal reliance on AI for software creation strengthens the argument that coding, once considered a future-proof skill, may face rapid commoditisation.