AI has not killed white-collar jobs as I feared: OpenAI’s Altman
TORONTO, CANADA — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was wrong about AI’s near-term impact on employment — walking back years of warnings about mass white-collar job displacement at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney.
Altman admits he misjudged AI’s economic impact
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman told CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn in a virtual interview.
He said OpenAI’s executives were “roughly right” on their technological predictions since ChatGPT launched in 2022, but “pretty wrong” on the social and economic implications.
Altman said he now understands why the displacement he predicted has not materialized — and identified human connection, not just task complexity, as the variable his forecasts missed.
Altman’s AI experiment revealed the limits of automation
Altman described a personal experiment that shifted his thinking: he used AI to generate replies to Slack and email messages on his behalf, then reversed course.
“We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon,” he said.
The AI replies were labeled “this is Sam’s AI,” and the exercise led him to conclude that professional communication has intrinsic value AI cannot substitute.
HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered, and CBA have announced job cuts tied to AI, even as Altman — whose company is preparing to file for a U.S. IPO at a potential $1 trillion valuation — argues the broader apocalypse scenario is not materializing.
“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” Altman said.
Altman’s CBA remarks validate what business process outsourcing (BPO) operators have argued for years: human interaction is not a residual task awaiting automation — it is a primary deliverable.
His personal experiment, using AI replies labeled “this is Sam’s AI” then reverting, mirrors the dynamic that keeps enterprise clients choosing offshore teams over fully automated pipelines.
Providers whose value proposition centers on relationship quality, not cost arbitrage, now have the CEO of the world’s most prominent AI company on record agreeing.
