OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar: There’s a ‘mismatch’ between AI’s abilities and the value companies are capturing

Artificial intelligence is now being treated as core economic infrastructure, and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says most organizations are barely scratching the surface of what it can do.

Friar wrote a LinkedIn post on Monday reflecting on her experience at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos last week. “This year felt different,” she writes. AI is no longer just a side conversation or a future bet, she explained. AI is currently being evaluated as core economic and strategic infrastructure, similar to geopolitics, energy, and security, she noted.

OpenAI’s finance chief since June 2024, Friar highlighted “capability overhang” as a concept that kept resurfacing at Davos—the gap between what AI can already do and the value organizations actually capture. According to Friar, there is a mismatch between today’s powerful AI capabilities and the relatively shallow way most people and companies use them, with advanced tools still only lightly integrated into real workflows and decision-making.

“Experience and execution are closing that gap faster than any amount of rhetoric,” she writes. “At OpenAI, we see that frontier users use seven times the amount of intelligence than the average user—they’re going deep on coding, deep research, and pushing the models to really be thought p...