Hi,

how was your summer? I went biking in Germany: great weather, lovely landscape and good food. And now it's back to business. I was in London last week to talk about the future of payroll. I will be at Unleash next month, presenting on pay transparency. Ping me if you'll be there.

As the AI storm rages on, I was puzzled by an announcement from OpenAI that they are working on a job platform. At first, I found it ironic. I thought it was another attempt to become relevant by a company that desperately needs to find new revenue streams. If you've been in HR Tech for as long as I have, you know that others, like Google, Meta and Twitter had tried that before. All failed.

And what is so compelling about hiring? Why would that be of strategic importance to OpenAI? Because I don't believe for a second that OpenAI's goal suddenly is to disrupt the hiring industry and deliver job boards. Why would they bother? The financials don't make sense.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that there must be something else at play. Something bigger and more strategic. So let's explore my hypothesis.

Why OpenAI's Job Platform Isn't About Jobs

When OpenAI announced their plans to launch a jobs platform and certification program last week, most people focused on the wrong question: Can they disrupt the hiring industry? So did I. I thought it was ironic that the company that’s been predicting the end of work for a long time wants to introduce a job platform. But while thinking about it, I realized that instead of asking whether OpenAI can disrupt recruitment, the real question is: what if this isn't about helping people find jobs at all?

The announcement is certainly ambitious: an AI-powered jobs platform launching by mid-2026, paired with a certification program aimed at training 10 million Americans by 2030. Major partners like Walmart, Accenture, and Indeed are on board. But the more I read about the timing, partnerships, and OpenAI's broader strategic needs, the more convinced I became that we're witnessing something far more calculated than another Silicon Valley attempt to "fix" hiring. As Thomas Otter mentions "increasing chatGPT revenues by 1% will have a bigger revenue impact than winning 10% of the job matching space".

What if this jobs platform isn't another recruiting solution? What if OpenAI is building the infrastructure to replace human hiring entirely? What if it's a Trojan horse designed to position OpenAI at the exact moment companies make hiring decisions, where they can suggest AI agents as alternatives to human workers?

The Real Strategy: Intercepting Hiring Decisions

Here's how this strategy works: Companies post open roles on OpenAI's platform, making the company the first to know about hiring needs across industries. But instead of just matching candidates to jobs, OpenAI will be uniquely positioned to intercept these hiring decisions with a simple question: "Why hire a customer service representative when our AI agent can handle those tasks for a fraction of the cost?"

This isn't speculation: it's exactly what OpenAI has been building toward. They're simultaneously promoting AI agents for workplace automation while creating the platform where hiring decisions are made. The jobs platform becomes a direct sales channel for their AI workforce solutions, capturing companies at their moment of greatest receptivity to alternatives.

Consider the Walmart partnership through this lens. Walmart employs 1.6 million people in the US, many in exactly the roles that AI agents could most easily replace: customer service, basic data entry, scheduling, inventory management, and simple problem-solving tasks. OpenAI isn't expecting Walmart's frontline workers to use ChatGPT for job hunting. They're positioning to suggest AI alternatives for the very positions Walmart is trying to fill.

The beauty of this strategy is its timing. Every job posting represents a company acknowledging they need additional capacity. That's the perfect moment to suggest an AI agent that never calls in sick, doesn't require benefits, and works 24/7. The platform creates thousands of these conversion opportunities daily.

People Data Is Gold

I also see another strategic layer: data acquisition for advertising revenue. OpenAI has been hinting at generating revenue through ads, but faces a fundamental disadvantage in the advertising market. Google, Meta, and LinkedIn sit on mountains of user profile data that enable sophisticated ad targeting. OpenAI has conversational data but lacks the rich demographic, professional, and behavioral profiles that make advertising truly valuable.

A jobs platform solves this immediately. Users willingly submit resumes, career histories, salary expectations, skills assessments, and job preferences. They reveal their career ambitions, financial situations, geographic flexibility, and professional relationships. This isn't just resume data. It's comprehensive life profiling that advertising algorithms crave.

Unlike LinkedIn's professional networking data, job seekers provide information with urgency and specificity. They're not just listing past experience. They reveal future intentions, current frustrations, and financial pressures. For advertising purposes, someone actively job hunting is far more valuable than someone passively maintaining a professional profile.

Why the Urgency?

This strategy addresses OpenAI's most pressing challenge: the economics of their current revenue model don’t add up. AI infrastructure is phenomenally expensive. The depreciation costs alone for new AI data centers built in 2025 are projected to hit $40 billion annually while generating perhaps $15-20 billion in revenue.

For OpenAI to justify their astronomical valuation, they need revenue streams that can scale to hundreds of billions of dollars. The math is sobering: they'd need paying customers equivalent to nearly half the world's population just to achieve standard profit margins on their data center spending. You won’t achieve that with a job board. As Alexander Chukovski pointed out “job search is just $30B worldwide.”

A successful workforce strategy changes this equation entirely and opens up multiple revenue streams: generating advertising revenue through rich user profiles, collecting comprehensive professional data about jobs, and creating a direct sales channel for AI workforce solutions. It's ambitious in a way that previous attempts weren't. Instead of selling subscriptions to individual users, they'd be selling AI agents to enterprises. These contracts could be worth millions per major client. Replace even 10% of customer service roles across Fortune 500 companies, and you're looking at revenue that dwarfs consumer subscription models.

The Microsoft Wild Card

And there's a final strategic dimension that might make OpenAI's ambitions even more compelling: Microsoft isn't just a passive bystander. What if they are actively orchestrating LinkedIn's replacement? Matt Charney included a insightful deep dive of OpenAI's ownership structure in his write up. What if the owner of LinkedIn who is also OpenAI's largest stakeholder (49%), has concluded that a 2003-era platform can't adapt to 2030's workplace reality?

More evidence can be found in their recent moves. Microsoft appointed LinkedIn's CEO to also oversee Microsoft Office, effectively signaling that LinkedIn's standalone importance is diminishing. When you dilute your CEO's focus, you're preparing for that platform's reduced strategic role. And while I enjoy Linkedin, I can't name one recent innovation (apart from the feed algorithm... and the jury's out on the AI Hiring Assistant).

The financial logic is compelling: Microsoft's stake in a successful AI workforce platform could generate exponentially more value than LinkedIn's growth in a shrinking human employment market. When a platform adds $17B to your annual revenue, you must plan ahead. But instead of retrofitting LinkedIn for an AI future, they might be funding its replacement through OpenAI. This isn't corporate tension: it's calculated succession planning where OpenAI's platform gradually replaces LinkedIn.

This Time Might Be Different

Silicon Valley giants have tried disrupting HR before and failed. Google abandoned recruiting tools. Facebook marketed employee communication products before quietly pivoting away. Twitter had a brief flirtation with hiring tech. The pattern is always the same: horizontal tech vendors underestimate HR complexity, then retreat. You can find more insights about HR Tech stack disruption Thomas Otter's excellent analysis of the OpenAI announcement.

OpenAI's approach is fundamentally different. Previous attempts tried to optimize existing hiring processes. OpenAI is building the infrastructure to eliminate hiring processes entirely. They're not competing with existing HR tech. They're planning to make it obsolete.

The regulatory and compliance challenges that killed previous disruption attempts become less relevant if your end goal isn't better human hiring, but AI agent deployment. Employment law complexity disappears when you're not dealing with employees. You don't have to worry about bias. Privacy regulations are simpler when you're managing agents, not people.

Altman's Vision of Work

There's no contradiction between Sam Altman's prediction of a post-work future and launching a jobs platform. The platform is explicitly designed as a transition mechanism. It helps companies find human workers in the short term while building the infrastructure and relationships to replace them with AI in the medium term.

This addresses the classic disruption timeline problem: how do you maintain revenue during the transition period? OpenAI's platform generates immediate revenue from job placements and certifications while positioning for the much larger AI agent market. It's a bridge strategy that funds itself. Employers will embrace it.

What This Means for the HR Tech Market

HR tech vendors should pay attention. Not because OpenAI will succeed at recruiting, but because success isn't their real goal. They're building market relationships and data advantages for a completely different business model.

The companies that survive this won't be those with the best recruiting features. They'll be the ones that understand human capital management's complexities and can articulate why human workers remain essential for their specific use cases. Who build the solutions to support employers and employees.

For job seekers, the implications are more complex. In the short term, another platform might mean more opportunities and better matching. In the longer term, they might be unwittingly providing data to train the very systems designed to replace their roles.

For employers, the value proposition seems obvious: better candidates with AI skills, lower costs, AI-powered matching. The longer term opportunity to replace certain workers with agents. But they're potentially building dependence on a vendor whose ultimate goal is convincing them they don't need employees at all.

The verdict

Will OpenAI revolutionize hiring? Probably not in the way most people expect. The regulatory complexity, cultural nuances, and operational realities of human capital management don't disappear because you have better algorithms. Traditional HR challenges remain formidable.

But asking whether they'll succeed at recruiting misses the point entirely. OpenAI is building a Trojan horse. The jobs platform creates market position, customer relationships, and data advantages for their real business: selling AI agents to replace the very jobs they're initially helping to fill. It's about scaling revenue to become a profitable and viable business, or at least attempting to. Whether they continue to receive the capital infusions needed to get there is a whole different story. Because this vision won't come cheap.

The most likely outcome isn't disruption of HR tech, but gradual erosion of the job market itself. Every successful placement builds OpenAI's credibility with employers. Every user profile improves their data advantage. Every employer partnership creates opportunities to demonstrate AI agent capabilities.

The real question isn't whether OpenAI will succeed in revolutionizing hiring. It's whether their attempt will successfully position them to sell workforce replacement at enterprise scale. That's a much more strategic—and concerning—goal than fixing recruiting.

The irony is perfect: build a jobs platform to eventually eliminate the need for jobs platforms. In classic Altman fashion, that is not disruption. It's replacement disguised as innovation.

P.S. I'm well aware that the technical design and capabilities of LLMs come with significant issues that must be resolved before any of this can be realized. But current hiring solutions aren't monolithic either. They're full of inefficiencies and limitations that we've simply learned to accept. The point of my article isn't to predict inevitable outcomes, but to think through what scenarios might be possible, while keeping in mind that they come with constraints to be solved. Maybe they can't be solved at all. Whether OpenAI can overcome the technical hurdles is less important than recognizing the strategic positioning they could be building while those solutions are being developed.