OpenAI CEO outlines AI revenue opportunities

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman used Cisco’s AI Summit to sketch out how the company expects to make money from artificial intelligence, pointing first to advertising and healthcare. He said AI-driven advertising for large consumer businesses is a likely model, but warned it will need tight controls. Altman added that companies increasingly want AI delivered as a cloud subscription, bundling security, data context, and access to multiple AI agents and APIs from OpenAI and other providers into a single platform.

Altman also floated a longer-term plan to use AI for drug discovery, with OpenAI potentially spending billions of dollars on compute to help cure diseases. In that scenario, the company might co-fund work with pharmaceutical partners and take royalties on successful treatments. He stressed that this kind of investment role is not in place today but argued that future scientific breakthroughs with AI will demand large amounts of capital, pushing OpenAI toward acting partly as an investor.