Business leaders and technology experts believe that AI is on the chopping block for white-collar jobs. Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says even CEO jobs aren’t safe from automation.
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the tech billionaire warned an audience of technology and policy leaders that AI superintelligence could soon surpass even the world’s most powerful executives, including his job as CEO of OpenAI.
“At some point in its evolution curve, an AI superintelligence could do a better job as the CEO of a large company than any executive, certainly me,” Altman acknowledged. That reality is not far away, he added. “We think that on our current trajectory, we may only be a few years away from an early version of true superintelligence.”
While the full impact of AI on white-collar jobs remains uncertain, new warnings from AI experts that the technology could transform professions from accounting to law have sent turmoil across the professional world. Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft’s head of AI, said last week that white-collar jobs will take 1 to 18 months before AI fully automates jobs. And AI researcher Matt Schumer’s much-discussed essay last week compared today’s debate over AI and jobs to February 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic upended the U.S. economy.
The idea that white-collar jobs could be upended marks a return to a sentiment widely shared in early 2025, when corporate executives were making similarly doom-and-gloom predictions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be cut. As AI becomes more powerful, Altman is further strengthening that idea.
“Today’s jobs will be destroyed because AI will be able to do many of the things that drive today’s economy,” Altman said. “It’s going to be very difficult to beat GPUs.”
AI is already reshaping the C-suite
AI is already playing a major role in C-suite transformation at some companies. luck It helped executives consolidate departments in 500 companies to achieve “greater flattening” by cutting middle management positions and eliminating junior and supporting roles. For example, at Moderna, both human resources and technology operate under a chief human resources officer and a digital officer as automation technology is increasingly deployed.
When it comes to white-collar jobs, AI has so far revealed only modest changes. A 2025 Thomson Reuters analysis of global professional companies found that AI has provided some productivity gains. However, this change did not lead to mass layoffs. Despite this reality, 61% of white-collar workers believe that AI could replace their jobs within the next few years, according to a study by online learning platform Udacity.
Still, Altman is bullish about AI’s potential, saying that in two years’ time, the world’s intellectual wealth will reside within data centers, surpassing the intelligence of most humans. “If we’re right, by the end of 2028 more of the world’s intellectual capacity could reside inside data centers than outside them.”
The CEO says AI could take his job, along with thousands of other roles, but his predictions are not pessimistic. Rather, he believes that this technology will only move humanity forward, as AI is just the latest technological advancement in human history to change the way we do things.
“We always find new and better things to do,” Altman said. “I am confident that we will continue to be driven to serve each other, express our creativity, achieve status, compete, and much more.”
