Apple is facing a tough new rival in the era of AI, according to the company’s former CEO.
Speaking at the Zeta Live conference in New York City on Thursday, Apple’s former CEO, John Sculley, said OpenAI represented “the first real competitor” that Apple has had “in many decades.”
“AI has not been a particular strength for them,” Sculley said of Apple.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
On some counts, Apple does appear to have fallen behind in the AI race, lacking the consistent product updates that have become customary at companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Meta. It has experienced product rollout setbacks, like the delay of a planned overhaul of its AI-powered assistant Siri earlier this year.
Sculley ran Apple from 1983 to 1993. He applied his marketing experience from over a decade at Pepsi-Cola, where he launched the “Pepsi Challenge” campaign, to help popularize the Mac brand. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had a tense relationship with Sculley and the board throughout his tenure. Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 before returning in 1997 and later becoming CEO.
Speaking on Thursday, Sculley acknowledged speculation that current Apple CEO Tim Cook might be considering retirement soon. Sculley said whoever replaces Cook would need to help Apple transition from the apps era to the agentic era.
“In the agentic era, we don’t need a lot of apps, it can all be done with smart agents,” Sculley said. (Agentic AI refers to technology that’s capable of performing agent-like behavior and autonomously accomplishing complex tasks on your behalf.)
Sculley, 86, who recently retired from his role as cofounder and vice chairman of the marketing tech company Zeta Global to become vice chairman emeritus, said agentic AI will help knowledge workers automate the heavy lifting of their workflows. That’ll shift more technology companies to subscription-based business models, he said.
“When we had apps at the center of everything, it was selling tools, selling products,” Sculley said. “When you think of subscription, it’s about people paying for something as long as they need it.”
Sculley said subscriptions offer a much better business model.
Meanwhile, a familiar face from Apple recently turned up at OpenAI: former design chief Jony Ive. OpenAI acquired Ive’s device startup earlier this year for more than $6 billion.
Ive said this week at OpenAI’s DevDay conference that he hoped the devices his team is working on would address some of the issues that smartphones and tablets have caused since their launch.
“He’s the one who actually designed and built the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad,” Sculley said of Ive. “If there’s anyone who is probably going to be able to bring that dimension to the LLM, in this case OpenAI, it’s probably going to be Jony Ive, working with Sam Altman.”
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