- Sam Altman says Gen Z need to do something different in the AI age
- Thinking outside the box may be key to getting a job, OpenAI CEO says
- AI will start taking over many roles soon, Altman predicts
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said he believes young people entering the workforce today should look to go beyond traditional ideas and try something different in order to stand out in today's AI-dominated world.
Speaking recently at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Altman said the disruption caused by AI in businesses everywhere may only just be getting started, and new workers should react to this uncertainty and see it as an opportunity.
“My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago rather than try something new,” Altman said. “I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.”
Lack of engagement
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Altman was keen to play up the effects that AI skills and services could have in the modern world of work, noting that “wide swaths” of the jobs we currently know, will soon be entirely handled by AI.
“It’s totally true that huge numbers of tasks that people do today will be done better, cheaper, and faster by AI - and completely differently,” Altman said.
“If you’re heading into the world right now to work on something, I think you want to start your career at a time of the greatest change, when the playing field is most open."
“I think people with high potential, drive, ideas, a new way of looking at things, and new skills tend to do relatively well when the ground is shaking the most.”
Altman himself started Loopt - a location-based social networking mobile app - in 2005 as a 19-year-old drop-out, before founding OpenAI as co-chair with Elon Musk in 2015
“There are many companies that can be built on top of the technology OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much bigger and, I hope, more important than OpenAI,” he said.
This isn't Altman's first thought about the future of working in the AI age, with the billionaire having laid out his opinions quite a few times in the past.
In May 2026, he hit out at claims the increasing global usage of AI technology worldwide will lead to a "jobs apocalypse", despite widespread reports of layoffs at major firms.
And in July 2026, Altman noted that he doesn't expect a change in society or working practices for quite some time, despite widespread promises that AI would boost our productivity and efficiency across the board.
Via Fortune
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