By Andrea Bossi ·Updated February 22, 2026 Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

Education has long been a tool for building wealth and experiencing economic mobility. Higher education, especially postgraduate degrees like business and law degrees, often lead to high earnings and better jobs. But in the age of AI, tenets like these may be dissolving, and the promise of education being a >interview.

“I think that we’re going to have a human level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks, like white-collar work where you’re sitting at a computer, whether you’re a lawyer, an accountant, a project manager, or a marketing person,” Suleyman said. “Most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”

He cited software engineering as an example of where this is already happening. Many engineers, Suleyman told FT, report using AI to assist their coding, which tweaks their role and turns them into quasi editors, who are debugging and architecting code more than just writing it. “That’s happened in the last six months,” he added.

What does this mean for those pursuing graduate degrees like MBAs and law degrees? It’s understandable if these predictions raise concern, but OthersideAI CEO Matt Shumer, who has shared similar sentiments, wrote in a viral essay that he’s not sharing predictions to make anyone feel hopeless. “I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt,” he wrote in the online piece, titled “Something Big Is Happening.” 

Shumer compared the current moment in the “AI race” to early 2020 in his essay. He correlated the current moment in AI development to when a certain virus was starting to spread, but en masse, there was little understanding about how it would turn into a pandemic and completely uproot the lives of billions. “I think we’re in the ‘this seems overblown’ phase of something much, much bigger than Covid,” he wrote.

Though progress made with AI is “eye watering,” as Suleyman told FT, there is still action to take now. 

In his nearly 5,000-word essay, Shumer recommends using AI “seriously,” as more than just a search engine; he suggests having “no ego about it” and knowing that using AI doesn’t make your expertise lesser; he advised building up savings, should disruption go as far as affecting livelihood.

Behind the scenes at Microsoft, its AI CEO said he wants to build superintelligence systems designed to keep humans “at the top of the food chain” and enhance and serve human wellbeing.

“There’s no question these are unprecedented times,” Suleyman said in the FT interview. “A lot of us at the company and the generation before me have seen multiple of these cycles over the last 30 years. And they require unprecedented action to land one of these big waves, and this is a wave unlike anything anyone has ever seen.”

The post AI Is Coming For White-Collar Jobs Faster Than Expected. Here’s How To Protect Your Career appeared first on Essence.

Author: Kimberly Wilson

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