OpenAI’s chief operating officer says legacy software makers are not asleep at the wheel of AI.
On Wednesday’s episode of the Uncapped podcast, Brad Lightcap said the software sale may have been unfair as the software company is working hard to implement AI.
“A: All of these companies are as ambitious and moving as quickly as any startup,” he said. “B has great customer relationships.”
Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 as chief financial officer and became COO of Frontier Labs in 2022.
He said on Wednesday’s podcast that in OpenAI’s experience working with these companies, he sees them rethinking the entire customer journey and exploring ways they can leverage AI to serve additional markets. He added that he was concerned that this segment of the company, which includes major companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle, was “sleeping”.
“Everyone is trying to run at the same speed. I think that’s exciting,” he said. “If you’ve been an AI for a long time and you’ve been a startup for a long time, perhaps paradoxically it might make sense to be legacy software for a long time.”
Lightcap’s comments come in the wake of a brutal slide in software stocks that has been dubbed the “software apocalypse.” The selloff began in early February, when already wary investors panicked over Anthropic’s new AI tool that can perform a variety of administrative tasks for people working in the legal industry.
Shares of companies like Salesforce, Snowflake and Microsoft have fallen 24% to 30% so far this year on fears that companies will be able to use AI to build their own tools.
OpenAI’s COO isn’t the only one taking a bullish stance on legacy players.
Dan Rogers, CEO of work management company Asana, which was particularly punished for the stock sale, said AI agents would only make his company’s software more attractive.
“Using AI or AI agents will not solve the coordination problem; in fact, it will magnify the problem exponentially,” Rogers told Business Insider’s Alistair Barr. He added that work management systems need to be in place so that humans and thousands of AI agents can work together.
Other technology leaders are considering the potential savings of using AI and vibecoding in their own software.
Anish Acharya, general partner at Andresen Horowitz, said on a podcast in February that using AI to build resource planning and payroll tools only saves about 10% of costs.
“These models have an innovation bazooka, so why turn it to restructuring payroll, ERP, CRM,” Acharya said, referring to enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software.
At an event in February, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang dismissed the sell market.
“The idea is that the tool industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI,” Huang said, explaining how AI will take advantage of the tools provided by software, rather than reinventing its own tools.
He added: “This is the most illogical thing in the world and time will tell.”