Apple Sees OpenAI its ‘first real competitor in decades,’ says former CEO John Sculley

Apple’s former chief executive, John Sculley, believes the iPhone maker is entering one of the most challenging competitive phases in its modern history — and that its biggest threat isn’t another hardware company but OpenAI.

Speaking at the Zeta Live conference in New York on Thursday, Sculley said OpenAI represents “the first real competitor Apple has had in many decades.” He argued that artificial intelligence is reshaping the technology landscape and that Apple has not positioned itself as strongly in this new era as rivals like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, reported Business Insider.

“AI has not been a particular strength for them,” Sculley said, suggesting that Apple’s measured pace in developing AI-driven products could leave it trailing faster-moving competitors. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, Apple has faced mounting questions about its artificial-intelligence strategy. The company has not delivered the steady stream of high-profile AI product updates that characterize its rivals, nor has it yet introduced a breakthrough generative-AI feature on the scale of ChatGPT or Gemini. Earlier this year, the company reportedly delayed a major overhaul of its virtual assistant Siri — a project intended to make the voice interface more conversational and competitive in the age of large language models.

Sculley, who led Apple from 1983 to 1993 after a successful marketing career at PepsiCo, is no stranger to the company’s internal struggles with vision and direction. His tenure is best remembered for helping popularize the original Macintosh while presiding over an era of tension with Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs. The two famously clashed over product strategy and leadership style, culminating in Jobs’s departure from Apple in 1985. Jobs later returned in 1997 and ushered in a new era of design-driven innovation that defined Apple’s modern identity.

At the conference, Sculley also addressed speculation about the eventual succession of current CEO Tim Cook, who has led Apple since 2011. He said that whenever the transition comes, the next leader will face a defining challenge: guiding Apple from what he called “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. He described this next phase as one in which artificial intelligence systems perform tasks autonomously rather than relying on users to open and manage individual applications.

Sculley, now 86, recently retired from his role as cofounder and vice chairman of the marketing-technology company Zeta Global, becoming vice chairman emeritus. He said the coming wave of “agentic AI” will help knowledge workers offload much of the routine work in their professional lives. That shift, he predicted, will push technology companies toward subscription-based business models, in which customers pay for ongoing services rather than one-time products.

“When we had apps at the center of everything, it was selling tools and products,” Sculley said. “When you think of subscriptions, it’s about people paying for something as long as they need it.”

His comments also highlighted how Apple’s former design genius, Jony Ive, has reemerged in the AI race on the side of Apple’s new rival. OpenAI acquired Ive’s device startup earlier this year in a deal reportedly worth more than $6 billion. At OpenAI’s DevDay conference this week, Ive said his team hopes to design new devices that “address some of the issues smartphones and tablets have caused since their launch.”

Sculley called Ive’s involvement with OpenAI a significant development, noting that the former Apple executive was the creative force behind some of the company’s most iconic products — from the iMac and iPod to the iPhone and iPad. “If there’s anyone who is probably going to bring that dimension to large language models, it’s Jony Ive, working with Sam Altman,” he said.

For Apple, that collaboration could signal a deeper challenge than any it has faced from traditional competitors. As the technology world shifts toward AI-driven “smart agents,” the company that once defined personal computing may now be under pressure to prove it can innovate in a future less dependent on apps — and more reliant on intelligence.