Bill Gates made his career and earned billions bringing personal computer software to bear in the workplace. According to him, the biggest changes brought by business software are yet to come—courtesy of artificial intelligence. But he also told uncertainty about the energy other tech companies are spending in applying AI in teaching vehicles to drive themselves.

“I’d say most of the opportunity to make computers improve work is in front of us rather than behind us,” Gates told at a Microsoft Research gathering at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., on Wednesday. Though today he spends most of his time as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he keeps a hand in shaping Microsoft’s future as a technology adviser to CEO Satya Nadella.

Gates describes even 2019’s business software as a comparatively short step up from pre-digital times, still at a “It’s better than Wite-Out” level. Computers have been used mostly for “extremely structured tasks for example, creating financial statements” where the machine guides the human through an “opaque” process, he stated, and for jobs like writing emails where the human, not the machine, knows the significance and context of the content in the messages.

However in another five years, the AI in Microsoft’s products will have grown a deep understanding of the facts and language of users and their businesses. Loaded with this information, a software assistant might have enough knowledge to handle undertakings that only an experienced human assistant could once perform—like identifying the most important items in a stack of emails or phone messages; or gathering all the people, facilities, and information required for a meeting.

Gates also says he thinks intelligent robots will soon start taking ordinary tasks off the plates of humans.

“So tasks like cleaning a room, or assembling something, if those can be done by robots, eventually those robots will not be super expensive,” he said.

Some of the essential technologies such a scenario demands—like voice recognition, computer vision, and robotic arms and legs—are already developed enough to carry those tasks, he said. But others, similar to a robotic hand with the agility of a human hand, stay years away.

Particularly, Gates surprised why big tech companies like Google and Uber preferred something as complex and risky as autonomous driving as the first potentially time-shifting AI business.

“We’ve a little bit made it opaque by making car-driving the paradigmatic task,” he said. “It has so much demand for liability, for dealing with arbitrary situations that are unexpected, like somebody stops in front of you or the ball rolling out (into the street) . . .” (Microsoft gives platform tools to other companies developing self-driving vehicles, but independent driving hasn’t been a major spotlight of the company’s own research.)

Staring still further out into the future, Gates said he thinks AI may ultimately force us to redefine work itself and the role it plays in human life. He recommended we may grow toward better searching.

“A day will come when we won’t be so focused on just working and avoiding disease,” Gates said. “We’ll need some new spiritual cause that binds us, other than just the basics.”

Gates called education the “master switch” for setting up young people for the demands of a redesigned job market. “If you could supercharge education, then you buy many generations of workers who are well matched to what those demands will look like.”