The CEOs are No Longer (Publicly) Threatening to Replace Humans With AI

Since ChatGPT came onto the scene in late 2022, there has been a singular message from tech executives to the broader workforce regarding the new technology: it is coming for your job. They have insisted, sometimes in the language of a flowery, futuristic utopia and sometimes as a straight-up threat, that artificial intelligence will result in a complete upheaval in the economy, wipe out entire categories of jobs, and fundamentally change the human relationship with work.

But over the last few months, a switch has flipped. Suddenly, the messaging around AI has gone from “meet your replacement” to “meet your new coworker, who is definitely not here to watch you work and eventually push you out!” The language has changed from warning to what feels like pacification—and it comes at a seemingly strange moment. By most accounts, it seems like the AI companies won. The frontier model makers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have filed to go public. Even xAI, Elon Musk’s also-ran of an AI firm best known for allegedly mass-generating child porn, got tucked into SpaceX and turned into the biggest IPO in history.

The mood has significantly shifted in the executive suite. Take Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, brought in to help the company wean itself off the teat of the OpenAI cash cow before it goes dry. In 2024, while speaking to the billionaire crowd at Davos, he said AI models “are fundamentally labor-replacing tools.”

Earlier this year, he got more specific on what labor. “White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or 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 said in an interview with the Financial Times.

But well before we reached the full automation timeline, Suleyman started walking back his position. “I said ‘tasks,'” Suleyman told The Verge earlier this month. “So that does not mean jobs… Jobs and roles are the broader category, and tasks are the components of that.” Instead, he now believes AI will make the tedium of work easier. “Sending an email, having a conversation with a colleague, putting together a PowerPoint — sub-tasks will increasingly become digitized, automated, and we can basically generate more and more of them. That does not necessarily mean that the role goes away at all,” he explained.

Now, let’s set aside the fact that in Suleyman’s dream future, workers will be having more meetings and letting their AI equivalent chat with their colleagues—a nightmare for people who are actual