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Rabat – Artificial intelligence will make entire categories of jobs obsolete as the technology advances, according to Sam Altman, who said the way many professions are practiced today is already becoming outdated.
Speaking during a rapid-fire interview with The Indian Express, Altman reflected on his own background in software engineering to illustrate the shift. “The way I learned to write software is now effectively completely irrelevant. It doesn’t mean there’s no longer a software engineering job in the future, but writing C++ code by hand, that’s over,” he said, arguing that this approach is rapidly losing relevance as AI systems increasingly generate and assist with code.
The profession itself will not disappear, but the way the work is performed is changing fundamentally. Software development is being reshaped by AI-assisted coding tools that automatically generate large portions of code.
Platforms such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and OpenAI’s Codex allow developers to describe what they want in plain language, while the system generates code, suggests fixes, and even edits multiple files across an entire project.
In many cases, engineers now act more like supervisors of AI systems than traditional programmers, reviewing and refining machine-generated code rather than writing every line themselves.
Surveys suggest the shift is already widespread. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of developers say they use or plan to use AI tools in their workflow.
Industry data suggest that approximately 41% of code written today is generated or assisted by AI tools, and coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot can produce up to 56% of the code developers write in some projects.
These tools can also significantly accelerate development. Controlled experiments by GitHub and Microsoft researchers found that developers using the AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot completed programming tasks about 55% faster than those working without the tool.
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Altman suggested that several professions will face similar transformations. In some cases, the work people currently perform may disappear altogether, while in others the job will evolve into something new. The broader point is that large groups of workers will need to adapt as AI reshapes how tasks are carried out.
Signs of this transition are already visible across the global technology industry. Companies are effectively reorganizing their workforces around AI systems capable of handling tasks that were once performed by humans.
Customer support roles, for example, have been among the first to shift. Salesforce said it cut around 4,000 support positions after deploying AI systems able to manage millions of customer interactions each week.
Other firms are making similar moves. The language-learning platform Duolingo announced plans to phase out some contract workers as it adopted an “AI-first” approach to generating educational content.
Industry data suggests the trend is accelerating. According to the world-leading outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, companies cited AI as a factor behind more than 55,000 job cuts in 2025 alone. Researchers and analysts say many routine tasks, including data entry, document review, customer service, and some coding work, are increasingly being automated by AI systems.
