OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has laid out his vision for the future of how humans and AI will work together, but warned of potentially serious effects for those companies that have been left behind.
Speaking at the Cisco AI Summit 2026, Altman described how AI tools and humanity can collaborate on a wide range of tasks, driving productivity and efficiency across industries.
“The capability of AI seems to me to be the greatest it has ever been,” Altman added. “We are planning for a world where demand will grow at an accelerated rate every year… Companies that are not prepared to quickly adopt AI workers will be at a huge disadvantage. And this will require a lot of work and some risks.”
Headwinds of AI
In a wide-ranging talk with Cisco President Jeetu Patel, Altman also discussed potential headwinds that could affect the AI industry in the future.
After a significant pause, he responded that the biggest concern was “some kind of global destabilization, a mega supply chain disruption.”
When asked about the current problem in the Moltbook AI world, Altman noted that he could imagine a world where AI agents could interact with each other and lead to new types of interactions.
This includes through OpenAI’s recently announced Codex app, which promises huge leaps in coding capacity and capabilities.
Altman said Codex was like he had “felt another ChatGPT moment” in which there is a “clear vision of the future of knowledge work and how companies and individuals are going to work in a completely different way.”
“Giving an AI agent full access to your computer and your web browser with all your sessions leads to incredible things, and that looks like it’s here to stay,” he added. “OpenAI did an incredible job bringing together a lot of ideas to make it look usable and real. It seems certain that will be part of our future.”
But perhaps not surprisingly, Altman was good-humored about the adoption of AI, noting that many observers are underestimating how much language models will improve.
“The models are going to get a lot better quickly,” he said, predicting a “10-fold subjective improvement” by 2026, “we’ve been trying to figure out how we can communicate what we think is happening.”
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