Here’s our run-down of the 12 most interesting things that CEOs have said about artificial intelligence recently — in interviews, on earnings calls, and in emails and letters written to their employees.
AIG — Peter Zaffino
“As we scale [GenAI] across underwriting, we’ve also been building AIG claims assistance. We can ingest unstructured data to expedite ‘first notice of loss’, prioritize claims assignments, and augment claims adjusters investigations with relevant external multimodal data from approved sources.”
“For claims, we’ve been training large language models to extract and organize key insights automatically to enable claims adjusters to make more informed decisions faster than ever in order to fulfill our promise of helping our clients when they need us most.”
“The processing time has decreased from days to hours. We’ve also seen cycle time for coverage endorsement reviews … decrease from hours to minutes. Our objective with these advanced tools is to enable more technical reviews, provide our underwriting and claims experts with more insight and capabilities, reduce cycle time, significantly enhance decision making, and meaningfully improve service to our clients and partners.”
Source: AIG Earnings call, August 2025
Amazon — Andy Jassy
“…We have strong conviction that AI agents will change how we all work and live. Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems….”
“Today, we have over 1,000 Generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but at our scale, that’s a small fraction of what we will ultimately build. We’re going to lean in further in the coming months. We’re going to make it much easier to build agents, and then build (or partner) on several new agents across all of our business units and G&A areas.”
“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
“As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
Source: Message from CEO Andy Jassy, June 2025
Anthropic — Dario Amodei
One possible scenario for AI’s impact on society, Amodei said, could be that “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs.”
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
Source: Axios interview, May 2025
AXA XL Americas — Lucy Pilko
“There’s AI and then there’s generative AI. We’ve been using AI in pricing models. … [GenAI] is actually going to be about insight … about the new value-add in underwriting. How can we underwrite risks that today feel uninsurable? How can we use this information to better understand where we’re a good fit from a balance sheet perspective? How can we use it to understand how clients can do more on a preventative basis?”
Source: InsureTech Insights Conference, June 2025
Disney — Bob Iger
“AI may be the most powerful technology that our company has ever seen, including its ability to enhance and enable consumers to access, experience, and enjoy our entertainment. We’re taking precautions to make sure of three things: One, that our IP is being protected …Second, that our creators are being respected, and last, that our customers are being considered and valued, particularly as this technology emerges rapidly.”
Source: 2025 Shareholder Remarks, March 2025
Duolingo — Luis von Ahn
“I think AI can allow us to accomplish a lot more. What used to take us years now can take us a week.”
“In the next five years, people’s jobs will probably change. We’re seeing it with many of our engineers. They may not be doing some rote tasks anymore. What will probably happen is that one person will be able to accomplish more, rather than having fewer people.”
“Every Friday morning, we have this thing: It’s a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days. I don’t know how to pronounce it. Those mornings, we let each team experiment on how to get more efficient to use AI.”
Source: New York Times interview, August 2025
Figma — Dylan Field
“Design will evolve as AI is integrated into user-facing surfaces. Right now we’re in the MS-DOS era for AI, where the prompt is the interface. Over time, new design patterns will emerge that enable deeper domain-specific use cases.”
“Just like the GUI helped everyday users understand the capabilities of computers, there will be a proliferation of interfaces that surface the capabilities of AI through exceptional design.”
“As the rate of technological progress accelerates, the future might seem dynamic and chaotic. It’s also going to be a lot of fun. At the end of the day, tools don’t change the world. You change the world.”
Source: Figma Blog – IPO Founder Letter, July 2025
Ford — Jim Farley
“There’s more than one way to the American Dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year [college] education. Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50 percent since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go? Artificial intelligence is gonna replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
Source: Aspen ideas Festival, June 2025
Meta — Mark Zuckerberg
“2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent that has coding and problem-solving abilities of around a good mid-level engineer…. This is going to be a profound milestone and potentially one of the most important innovations in history, as well as over time, potentially a very large market. Whichever company builds this first, I think is going to have a meaningful advantage in deploying it to advance their AI research and shape the field.”
“I don’t think you’re going to see this year an AI engineer that is extremely widely deployed, changing all of development. I think this is going to be the year where that really starts to become possible and lays the groundwork for a much more dramatic change in 2026 and beyond.”
Source: Meta earnings call, January 2025
Microsoft — Satya Nadella
“The knowledge work of today could probably be automated. Who said my life’s goal is to triage my email, right? Let an AI agent triage my email. But after having triaged my email, give me a higher-level cognitive labor task of, ‘Hey, these are the three drafts I really want you to review.'”
“The knowledge work may be done by many, many agents, but you still have a knowledge worker who is dealing with all the knowledge workers. And that, I think, is the interface that one has to build.”
“…The new workflow for me is: I think with AI and work with my colleagues.”
Source: Interview with Dwarkesh Patel, February 2025
OpenDoor — Kaz Nejatian
“We need to move faster — always. And we can’t do that without being AI obsessed. So, starting today, the first line in everybody’s job expectation is simply this: Default to AI. (This applies to everyone, including me!)
“Starting with the next performance review, in addition to asking how much impact each employee delivered we will also ask ourselves how frequently does each person default to AI.”
“If you reach for Google Doc or Sheets before you reach for an AI tool, you are not defaulting to AI. If the prototype for a project is not built in Cursor or Claude Code, you are not defaulting to AI.”
“AI use is a skill, like anything else. The more you use it, the better you can get at it. I expect every one of us to become experts at this. We will help you with resources and training, however it is ultimately up to you to master this skill.”
Source: X post, September 2025
Shopify — Tobias Lütke
“Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify… I use it all the time, but even I feel I’m only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it…”
“What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by… using it a lot. It’s just too unlike everything else… We also learned that, as opposed to most tools, AI acts as a multiplier. We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done.”
“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
”Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI…. [They must ask themselves] what would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”
Source: Twitter/X – leaked internal memo, April 2025
Uber — Dara Khosrowshahi
“There’s a perception that AI is a tech thing, [but] it’s a broad tool to be used for everybody … I think there’s a transition that needs to happen, which is to train students to use AI… You’re not going to be put out of work by AI, you’re going to be put out of work by the person who knows how to use AI better.”
Source: Brown University Interview with President, April 2025
Walmart — Doug McMillon
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job. Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it… Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side.”
Source: Wall Street Journal, September 2025
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