OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has laid out his vision for the future of how humans and AI will work together, but warned of potentially dire consequences for companies that have fallen behind.
Speaking at the Cisco AI Summit 2026, Altman outlined how AI tools and humans can collaborate on a wide range of tasks, increasing productivity and efficiency across industries.
“The competence of AI feels to me the greatest it’s ever been,” Altman added. “We’re planning a world where demand will grow at an accelerated pace every year…Companies that aren’t set up to quickly adopt AI workers will be at a huge disadvantage. And that will require a lot of work and some risk.”
AI headwind
In a wide-ranging chat with Cisco president Jeetu Patel, Altman also discussed the possible headwinds that could affect the AI industry going forward.
After a considerable pause, he replied, “some kind of global destabilization, mega supply chain disruption,” was the biggest concern.
Asked about the current problem child of the AI world, the Moltbook, Altman noted that he could envision a world where AI agents could interact with each other, leading to new types of interactions.
This includes via OpenAI’s recently announced Codex app, which promises huge leaps forward in coding ability and features.
Altman said Codex was like he had “felt another ChatGPT moment”, where there is a “clear view of the future of knowledge work and how companies and individual people are going to work in a completely different way”.
“If an AI agent gets full access to your computer and your web browser with all your sessions, it leads to incredible things – and it looks set to continue,” he added. “OpenAI did an incredible job of bringing many ideas together to make it feel usable and real. It seems to be part of our future.”
But perhaps unsurprisingly, Altman was in a positive mood about AI adoption, noting that many observers underestimate how much language models will improve.
“The models are going to get so much better quickly,” he said, predicting a “subjective 10x improvement” by 2026, “we’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate what we think is happening.”
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