OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns, these jobs may vanish as AI takes over
According to Altman, the customer support shift is already complete.
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Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept—it’s already reshaping industries, eliminating traditional roles, and raising new concerns about the future of work. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has issued a direct warning: some jobs are on the verge of extinction, and AI is the driving force behind the change.
Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference, hosted by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Altman didn’t hold back. He named customer service as the first major job category that AI has all but taken over.
“Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person,” Altman said to Michelle Bowman, Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve. “There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”
According to Altman, the customer support shift is already complete. Today AI tools only handle queries but do so faster, more accurately, and more efficiently than human representatives. With instant responses and zero wait times, these systems eliminate the frustration of traditional support calls—and the need for human staff.
“That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine,” Altman added.
Read More: AI can fool banks and wipe out jobs, warns OpenAI CEO Sam Altman AI in Healthcare: Smarter Than Doctors? Altman didn’t stop at call centers. He turned to another high-stakes domain: healthcare. He claimed that AI, particularly tools like ChatGPT, has now surpassed most human doctors in diagnostic accuracy.
“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better—it's like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” Altman noted.
Still, the OpenAI chief wasn’t ready to fully entrust AI with his own healthcare, acknowledging that despite the leap in accuracy, human oversight remains crucial.
“Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not—like, maybe I’m a dinosaur here—but I really do not want to entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop,” he admitted.
Altman’s remarks underscore a rapidly shifting reality: AI isn’t just enhancing jobs—it’s replacing them, and not only in manual or repetitive roles. From banking and support desks to diagnostics and decision-making, AI is becoming a key player in sectors once considered human-only domains.
