Sam Altman says scrolling through his inbox makes him feel productive even though AI could do it faster.
On an episode of David Senra’s podcast, released Sunday, the OpenAI CEO said that even with Codex available, he still defaults to working through email manually.
“I should not be scrolling mindlessly through my emails and trying to figure out which one is least painful for me to open and respond when I don’t want to be dealing with it,” Altman said.
Instead, Altman said, he should be handing more routine work to Codex, including moving information between apps and working through his to-do list. Codex is OpenAI’s software engineering agent and coding assistant that can perform tasks on a computer, with a particular focus on helping programmers write, review, and test software.
“And yet there’s something in my mind that is encoded that doing this kind of stuff is what it means to work and what it means to be productive,” Altman said.
“If you asked me, I would never say I like doing it that way,” he added. “It makes no sense other than I must secretly like it or feel good about it.”
Altman called the habit psychologically inconsistent and said better products could make switching to AI more seamless.
Altman is not the only CEO trying to stop email from dictating their day. A recent Business Insider analysis of 100 “Power Hours” interviews found that leaders commonly set priorities before opening their inboxes, check messages during designated time blocks, keep replies short, automate or delegate triage, and enforce evening cutoffs.
Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki has taken the AI route Altman described. In a March interview with Business Insider, he said he has built scripts that send him a consolidated summary of key information from the previous 24 hours.
Siemens CEO Roland Busch said he receives about 200 emails a day but tries to keep his inbox below 100. He told Business Insider that most of his replies are simply “OK” or “no.” For longer responses, he sometimes dictates while walking through the office.
For now, Altman said on the podcast, people are “straddling these two worlds”: they still use computers in familiar ways, such as manually sorting through email, while also experimenting with AI tools that can perform those tasks for them.
Altman’s comments come as he’s been on a media blitz of a summer and as OpenAI prepares to go public. The company confidentially filed to go public in June but has delayed its plans to go public until likely next year.
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