For two years, Sam Altman warned that AI would gut office work.
This week, he changed his tune.
He spoke by video at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia event in Sydney. He said the job loss he feared has not shown up.
"I'm delighted to be wrong about this," Altman told CBA chief Matt Comyn.
The timing is key. OpenAI just filed for a US IPO last Friday.
The deal could value the firm near $1 trillion. It plans to raise as much as $60 billion.
A soft message on jobs is a useful one when you're about to ask the market for that much cash.
Altman said OpenAI was "roughly right" on the tech but "pretty wrong" on the social and money side.
The "human part" of work, he said, was bigger than he thought.
His example was small but telling. He used AI to reply to his own Slack and email, then stopped. People wanted to hear from him, not from a stand-in.
He's not saying AI has not cut jobs. Banks and tech firms have already made moves.
HSBC and Standard Chartered have flagged AI cuts. Amazon has cut some corporate roles. Commonwealth Bank, the host of his Sydney talk, has done the same.
Altman's point is that the pace was slower than he feared, not that the cuts aren't real.
That's a real shift from his past warnings. In 2024, he said customer support jobs would be "totally, totally gone" to AI.
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OpenAI filed its S-1 with the SEC last Friday, per CNBC. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal.
A trillion-dollar value needs a trillion-dollar story.
"AI helps workers, not replaces them" is an easier sell to retail and pension fund buyers than "AI is coming for your job."
Altman didn't link the two himself. He didn't need to.
For context, the IPO would be one of the biggest in market history. By comparison, Saudi Aramco raised about $29 billion in 2019.
A trillion-dollar value would make OpenAI worth more than ExxonMobil or Coca-Cola. That's a high bar to clear.
Two things from here.
First is the IPO filing itself. How the IPO papers frame AI's role in jobs will say more than any single chat.
Second is the corporate side. Standard Chartered is cutting more than 7,000 roles.
The bank told staff that AI will replace "lower-value human capital." Plenty of CEOs are not softening their tone, even if Altman is.
Altman's view is that the jobs picture will look "very different" than people thought. Whether that means better or just slower is the part he didn't answer.
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