AI automating white-collar jobs in 18 months, according to Microsoft's AI chief. How are small business owners actually responding?

Seeing a lot of headlines lately about AI replacing accounting, legal, marketing, project management, basically anything done at a desk, and the timelines keep getting shorter. Microsoft's AI CEO is now saying 18 months for "human-level performance on most professional tasks."

I have a small business with a few employees and some contractors. A chunk of what I pay for, bookkeeping, content, admin, reporting, could realistically be handled by AI tools within the next year or two if this plays out even halfway as described.

So I'm trying to figure out how to think about hiring and budgeting right now, without overreacting to what might still be hype.

A few things I'm genuinely unsure about:

If you've already replaced a role (or part of a role) with AI tools, was it actually worth it or did it create new problems?

Are you factoring any of this into decisions about hiring in 2026, or are you treating it as background noise for now?

For those of you in service businesses where you charge for the work (accounting firms, agencies, legal, consulting), are your clients starting to push back on pricing because they assume AI is cutting your costs?

Not looking for predictions about the future of AI. Just curious what's actually changing on the ground for other small business owners right now.