Altman says AI is reshaping the economy slower than he expected

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the economy is adapting to AI slower than he expected, blaming customer habit and procurement inertia rather than the technology itself.

In an interview with podcaster David Senra posted Sunday, Altman said he had wrongly assumed GPT-4's 2023 release would quickly put more software businesses "up for grabs." Instead, he said, "people keep doing the same things they're doing. They keep buying from the same company. They keep sort of wanting to use their tools in the same way."

Altman called the slower adoption cycle "a positive in many ways" and offered a familiar analogy. "It was amazing to me that people still went to Blockbuster... force of habit, and the way people do things and changing behavior is just much harder than the tech nerds realize." He added that he still works through his own inbox manually, even though OpenAI's Codex coding assistant could handle more of the task.

The walk-back lands in the same news cycle as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prior claim that AI could eliminate 50% of all entry-level white-collar work in five years, and the Q1 2026 selloff in Salesforce, Atlassian, and Asana that traders dubbed the "SaaSpocalypse" over a bet that AI tooling would disintermediate incumbents.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The next enterprise-software quarter will be the cleanest test of which timeline was right.