Sam Altman says his doom predictions were wrong and the ‘human side’ of employment can’t be replaced
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday that AI had not delivered the sweeping job losses he once anticipated — and that his earlier warnings about entry-level white-collar roles being rapidly eliminated had simply not come true.
Speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney, Altman said he and his executives had been “roughly right” on the technological predictions made when ChatGPT launched in 2022, but “pretty wrong” on the social and economic implications, Reuters reported.
“I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” said Altman, according to Reuters.
The disruption is real, just slower than feared
Altman had previously predicted that AI could compress the historical rate of job turnover — normally around 50 per cent of jobs changing every 75 years — into a much shorter window. That compression has not materialized on the timeline he expected, according to Euronews.
Several major global companies, including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have announced that some roles within their organizations are being replaced or reshaped through the use of AI tools and automation. The pattern is not mass elimination — it is quiet restructuring, and the distinction matters enormously for workforce planning.
Cutting headcount isn't the answer
The more pressing challenge for HR leaders may not be disruption itself, but how organizations respond to it. Among organizations piloting or deploying autonomous business capabilities, approximately 80 per cent report workforce reductions, according to a survey of 350 global business executives by Gartner in the third quarter of 2025.
Gartner found that organizations seeing real returns from AI aren’t the ones slashing payroll — they’re the ones investing in people, focusing on upskilling employees to use AI tools and linking hiring criteria to AI proficiency.
For people leaders across Canada, that finding is both a warning and an opportunity. Organizations racing to reduce headcount under the banner of AI transformation may be solving the wrong problem.
The human element remains irreplaceable
Altman's own behaviour underscores the point. He explained that he had experimented with using AI systems to respond to Slack and email messages before deciding to personally handle some communications again, saying: “…it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about people.” This made him realize that the “human part” of employment couldn’t be replaced, he said.
