Gen Z is entering a job market being turned upside down by AI—and according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the disruption is only getting started. But he thinks ambitious young workers have a chance to come out ahead if they’re willing to ditch the playbook and bet on what’s next.
“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 in an interview last week with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
In turn, “wide swaths” of current jobs, at least as they’re done today, will be entirely handled by AI, Altman said. While he also cautioned that the transformation won’t happen as quickly as many people expect, the upheaval could create opportunities for ambitious workers willing to try something different by considering what new businesses could be built with AI.
“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.”
AI is creating a rare window for entrepreneurs: ‘The playing field is most open,’ Altman says
For Altman, that opportunity goes beyond finding a way to stand out in the job market. He believes AI could open the door to businesses that would have been difficult—or impossible—to build just a few years ago.
“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.
Altman knows a thing or two about building a company from scratch. In 2005, he dropped out of Stanford, where he was studying computer science, to cofound Loopt, a location-based social networking startup that was later acquired.
He went on to join startup accelerator Y Combinator, serving as its president from 2014 to 2019. Now, he sees AI as a chance for a new generation of founders to tackle problems that once seemed out of reach.
“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,” Altman said to Stanford students.
“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.”
More Americans are already taking that entrepreneurial leap. In 2025, they filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses, the highest annual total in the two decades the Census Bureau has tracked the data.
Alexis Ohanian and Mark Cuban agree that AI is giving entrepreneurs a leg up
Other prominent founders and investors have echoed that AI is giving a new generation of ambitious entrepreneurs an advantage.
Alexis Ohanian, who tracks the origins of Reddit back to a Waffle House visit when he was 19, has made a similar argument: Founders who build with AI from day one have an edge because they aren’t trying to retrofit the technology into an older business.
“Anyone who has started a company in the last two years has been building a company in the AI age, and they are at a default advantage, because the DNA of their organization is in this new world,” he told Fortune last year.
“There are folks very hungry right now who are building new companies, who are ready to drink the milkshake of so many incumbents. That founding DNA makes a huge difference in how well they’re going to be able to execute, how well they’re going to be able to build.”
Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban has also urged entrepreneurs to treat AI as a competitive advantage—not an optional extra.
“If you’re not using [AI] to move faster or make smarter decisions, you’re behind,” Cuban told Fortune in 2025.
“[AI isn’t] just a tool, it’s leverage. If you’re not using AI to move quicker and make smarter decisions, you’re at a disadvantage,” Cuban said. “The most successful entrepreneur will understand how to properly use AI.”