OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said that AI is reducing the need for some workers, but only repetitive ones.
In a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on “Mad Money,” Friar addressed AI use for efficiency at OpenAI, using her own finance department as an example.
“There is no doubt we are doing things with our own products inside of finance, for example, that do limit the number of people we need,” Friar told Cramer. “But in many cases it’s for jobs that I don’t think of as great jobs, frankly.”
Friar pointed to credit checks as one example. OpenAI’s procurement operation was conducting them at an annual rate of 2,800 last year, she said.
“That credit check is a pretty mundane piece of work,” Friar said. “Do you want a junior analyst doing that, or can we get a very intelligent model to do it for us?”
“I think it’s actually enabling people to do more work at the edge, more work where intelligence is needed,” Friar added. “And then you get a lot of the rote stuff done by the model and actually done at probably a better scale and with more accuracy, frankly.”
The financial payoff was significant: Friar said the cost per check fell from $200 per check to about 17 cents.
“That is a great ROI for a CFO,” Friar added.
Friar’s comments come as some leading AI figures issue much starker warnings about the technology’s impact on employment. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs, while Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as a “godfather of AI,” recently said such predictions were “probably right.”
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Hinton said AI still fails at some tasks, but cautioned that the technology is improving quickly.
“We’re in the very early stages,” Hinton told Bernie Sanders in an interview in November 2025. “This is a new technology. It’s getting better very fast.”