“The question is, has it come so fast that you don’t have time to adjust to it?” Bill Gates just said in an interview with CNN.

The Microsoft cofounder noted that AI is already capable of taking over administrative roles like telesales, but it’s still falling short when it comes to more complex tasks—and even he’s dumbfounded by just how quickly it’s closing the gap.

“It’s improving at a rate that surprises me,” the tech pioneer, worth $122 billion, said in the interview, while pointing to its deep research capability as an example.

“A few times a day, I take some complex question, and just for fun, I see AI does an awfully good job gathering all the materials, and summarizing what I need to know.” 

In just a few years, the technology has gone from writing emails to generating functional code. That’s why no one can pin down when exactly the tipping point will come, Gates added.

“AI today can replace human work, the most complex coding tasks, [but] it’s not able to do [it] yet. And people in the field disagree: is that within the next year or two, or is it more like ten years away?”

Tech leaders agree that AI will be as good as human workers

Fellow business leaders have been candid that AI will be just as capable as, or even more advanced than, most human workers in the next few years.  

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that up to 50% of entry-level white collar jobs could be replaced by AI within 5 years. 

“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei warned in an interview with Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also told employees that within the next few years, AI would reduce some corporate roles, like customer service representatives and software developers. And over at Meta, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg is already getting started on automating some of his employees’ jobs—the tech billionaire announced that the company is building an “AI engineer” to help with coding tasks.

That shift isn’t unique to just tech roles. IBM cut around 8,000 jobs this May in HR and other departments, as the tools take over routine administrative tasks. Instead, the company is hiring more engineers and salespeople, signaling a transition to more roles that require creativity and complex decision-making.

AI is improving productivity, Bill Gates says

As more companies pull back on hiring and training early job seekers, they are also shrinking the talent pool of future leaders. The jobs that have historically served as stepping stones for entry-level workers are under threat. 

With recent college grads struggling to land entry-level jobs, Gates weighed in on growing fears that AI is taking opportunities from young workers. He argued that rising productivity should free people’s time to do more of the other things they enjoy—from side hustles to vacations.

“When you improve productivity, you can make more [jobs],” Gates said.  “It means you can free up these people to have smaller class sizes or have longer vacations or help to do more, so it’s not a bad thing.”

New research echoes that already, 4 in 10 say it has provided better work-life balance, reduced stress, and improved decision-making.