Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley Says This Company Is Apple’s First ‘Real Competitor’ in Years

Former Apple CEO John Sculley, who famously led the company from 1983 to 1993, believes that ChatGPT creator OpenAI is Apple’s “first real competitor in many, many decades.” 

Speaking on a panel at Zeta Live, an annual event hosted by Zeta Global, a marketing technology firm that he cofounded in 2007, Sculley said that he has “huge admiration for the way Tim Cook has run Apple,” but that “AI has not been a particular strength of theirs.”

Sculley explained that in the 80s, Steve Jobs saw personal computing as a medium for empowering office workers with tools that provide rapid access to knowledge. Now, he says, AI agents that can autonomously carry out workflows are handling “more and more of the heavy lifting” that knowledge workers for decades have done in tandem with personal computers.” 

Where Apple’s personal computing revolution imbued workers with intelligence, Scully said, agentic AI is the intelligence, capable of doing the work previously entrusted to well-trained humans. “It completely changes the way we do business models,” he added. 

Going forward, Sculley anticipates more companies moving to subscription-based business models, because instead of selling tools that enhance worker productivity, companies will be selling access to solutions that operate on their own, with very little human interaction. In this “agentic era,” he said, a model in which customers pay for a solution for as long as they need it makes more economic sense. 

This waning dependence on individual apps could be a challenge for Apple, which has built a massive app-based ecosystem. The company recently said that the App Store “facilitated $406 billion in developer billings and sales in 2024.” 

Acknowledging rumors that Cook is planning to retire soon, Sculley said that whoever becomes the next Apple CEO will need to position the company for an era in which “we don’t need a lot of apps, it could all be done with smart agents working across workflow automation.” 

It appears OpenAI is already positioning itself for such an era. At the company’s DevDay conference on October 6, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the introduction of apps within ChatGPT, with early adopters including Figma, Booking.com, and Canva. As Sculley said, this new feature enables consumers to offload some of the “heavy lifting” of using apps to AI. 

Another OpenAI-shaped challenge for Apple? Going up against their beloved former head designer, Jony Ive. In May OpenAI announced that it had acquired Ive’s hardware company, io, for $6.4 billion in order to collaborate on an Ive-designed, OpenAI-powered physical device. “If there’s anyone who’s probably going to be able to bring that dimension to the LLM,” said Sculley, “it’s probably going to be Jony Ive working with Sam Altman.” 

OpenAI has been on a dealmaking tear recently. This morning, the company announced a deal with chipmaker Broadcom to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed AI accelerator hardware. That deal builds on other recent agreements with fellow chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD that cumulatively have secured over 30 gigawatts of compute capacity just in 2025.