‘Adapt as you go’: Sam Altman tells business to stop waiting for certainty on AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned business leaders that traditional planning cycles are struggling to keep pace with artificial intelligence, as Commonwealth Bank pushes deeper into enterprise AI adoption.

Speaking with CBA CEO Matt Comyn via video link at the bank’s Accelerate AI event in Sydney, Altman said AI had reached a “notable place” technologically, but business and economic adoption remained in its early stages.

The gap between AI capability and organisational adoption is now one of the biggest challenges facing leaders, he said.

“What's it going to take to integrate this into people’s lives and into our companies so we get the acceleration we deserve,” Altman said.

Altman said CEOs were now grappling with how to run companies when the technology environment is changing faster than annual or quarterly planning cycles can absorb.

SEE MORE: Commbank names first chief AI officer

“How can I run a company on an annual or quarterly planning cycle when the whole world is changing every two months or less,” he said.

“It's very difficult to understand the co-evolution of a society and technology in a vacuum. You kind of have to start moving and adapt as you go.”

Altman said the best companies were not waiting for perfect certainty before acting, but were allowing controlled experimentation, learning from use and adjusting quickly.

“This is the thing that I have observed the best companies do,” he said. “Rather than rigidly set every possible policy, they allow a small amount of adoption.”

The comments come as CBA accelerates its own AI strategy, building out senior leadership and research capability around the technology.

On 18 May, the bank appointed AI researcher Professor Mary-Anne Williams as its first chief AI scientist, bringing expertise across AI research, agentic AI and innovation into the organisation.

Williams will lead CommBank’s team of AI scientists, a group of researchers specialising in machine learning, responsible AI, AI security and generative AI. Her remit includes shaping the bank’s AI research agenda, attracting AI talent and supporting the responsible use of AI across CBA.

The appointment follows the bank’s decision in November to name Ranil Boteju as chief AI officer and comes after CBA was ranked fourth globally and first in Asia Pacific in the 2025 Evident AI Index for banking AI maturity.

The index benchmarks 50 global banks across talent, innovation, leadership and transparency. CBA was also recognised for talent development and responsible AI leadership.

Altman said companies were still working out how AI can drive measurable productivity and revenue gains, despite rapid advances in capability.

“My best answer to that is it's all still very new, and it's just going to take a little bit longer to figure out how a company actually does run more efficiently and to make these great new products,” he said.

“But if a year from now we’re still talking about the same question, I'd be more concerned.”

Altman also said AI agents would change how companies interact with workplace tools and systems, but businesses had not yet settled on the right operating model.

He said many current AI agents are being pushed through communication channels built for people, which is unlikely to be the long-term answer.

“What I expect will happen is we will figure out new ways for agents to use our same services and interact with our same systems and data, but via a different channel,” he said.

Altman also pointed to the next phase of AI interfaces: systems that are persistent and always running, rather than tools that only respond when prompted.

“What I think will be possible soon is you will have an AI that is always running. It is understanding you and your goals and your company's goals. And it's just trying to be as helpful as it can given the amount of computing resources it has available,” he said.

The shift raises questions for large organisations such as CBA, where AI adoption needs to be balanced against regulation, customer trust, data security and operational risk.

Altman said AI’s broader impact made transparency critical, including being open about uncertainty.

OpenAI had tried to “think out loud”, he said, because society would be affected by the technology and needed to be involved in the direction of travel.

“I believe that so much of society here is going to be impacted by this, that we are all stakeholders, and it is better for us to be going in the direction of too much transparency and occasionally being wrong,” he said.

Altman’s comments land at a time when Commbank is positioning AI as a core operating capability rather than a technology experiment. The bank has been building AI leadership across research, executive accountability and responsible deployment, while Comyn has repeatedly framed AI as central to improving customer outcomes and productivity.

Altman said companies had to confront the fact that AI is moving faster than many organisations are designed to move.

“I think that business is going to get reinvented when the world has to move at a much faster clock cycle to be competitive,” he said.

The challenge now is not whether companies will adopt AI, but how quickly they can learn to use it safely, productively and at scale.