An OpenAI executive has named the three areas of work he expects artificial intelligence to automate first: life sciences, software engineering and customer service. Olivier Godement, the company’s head of product for business products, made the comments on an episode of the “Unsupervised Learning” podcast, as reported by Business Insider in December 2025.
Godement’s view is notable because it comes from someone whose job is selling AI tools to enterprises, so it reflects where OpenAI sees demand and results today rather than a distant forecast. He described changes that, according to him, are already under way inside large organizations.
Life sciences and drug development
In the life sciences, Godement pointed to drug development as the process most likely to change. Bringing a new medicine forward involves months or years of work with complex, scattered data from many sources. AI models, he argued, can pull that information together and draw conclusions far faster than human teams.
He cited OpenAI’s work with Amgen, the pharmaceutical company, as an example. According to Godement, research steps and document updates that once took teams a long time can now be completed in minutes with AI assistance. If that holds across the industry, the time needed to bring a new drug to market could shrink considerably, though that outcome has not yet been demonstrated at scale.
Software engineering
Software engineering is the second field on his list. Current models can write code, find bugs, navigate large code bases and complete feature work that previously required teams of engineers. OpenAI says its GPT-5 series handles complex, production-level coding tasks, and technology companies have been reorganizing their engineering workflows around AI assistants over the past year.
Customer service
Customer service is the clearest case, in Godement’s telling. Call centers, live chat and responses to routine, repeated requests are tasks that AI systems can already handle with a high degree of accuracy.
That concern echoes warnings from Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist often called one of the godfathers of AI. In interviews earlier in 2025, Hinton argued that routine intellectual work would be the first to be handed to machines, and he singled out paralegals and call center staff as groups especially exposed.
What it means for workers
The broader point is that automation is no longer a question confined to factory floors. AI is now taking on office tasks that few people expected to see automated only a few years ago. For workers in the three fields Godement named, the practical question is how quickly they can shift toward skills that complement these systems: supervising AI output, handling exceptions, and doing the judgment-heavy work that models still struggle with.
Predictions from AI vendors about job displacement should be read with some care; the companies have a commercial interest in portraying their products as transformative. Even so, Godement’s list matches where enterprise adoption of AI has been most visible so far.
