What Altman's "Superintelligence by 2028" Warning Means for Enterprise AI Strategy Right Now
By Nathan Pettyjohn, Founder & President, Applied AI Association Published: February 19, 2026 | aaiaglobal.com/blog
This week's AI Beat newsletter focused on Sam Altman's keynote at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 and the accelerating race for enterprise AI dominance. This companion piece goes deeper — into what these developments mean for your organization's strategy, and what to do about it before the window closes.
The Statement That Should Stop Every Business Leader Cold
This week, at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi — the first major global AI conference hosted in the Global South — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made what may be the most consequential public statement from any technology CEO in years:
"By the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside data centers than outside of them."
He was careful to say it could be wrong. But he was equally insistent that "it bears serious consideration."
For anyone running a company today, that deserves more than a passing tweet. Let's actually unpack it.
What Superintelligence Actually Means for Your Organization
The word "superintelligence" tends to send people in one of two directions: either they dismiss it as sci-fi, or they spiral into existential anxiety. Neither is useful.
Here's a more practical framing: What Altman is describing is a world where AI systems can outperform humans across a wide range of cognitive tasks — not just writing emails or summarizing documents, but conducting advanced research, managing complex projects, and making high-stakes decisions with better judgment than most executives.
The thing is, we don't need to wait for 2028 to feel the effects. The trajectory is already visible.
AI systems have progressed from struggling with high school mathematics to solving research-level mathematics and producing novel results in theoretical physics — in roughly 18 months. The pace is not slowing down.
For enterprise leaders, this isn't a philosophical discussion. It's a resource allocation and organizational design question. Specifically: if the cognitive capability you're hiring humans for today is going to be available on-demand at a fraction of the cost in 24–36 months, what should you be building, acquiring, and designing right now?
Five Things Happening in AI This Week That Enterprise Leaders Can't Ignore
1. The Enterprise Software Stack Is Under Attack
Earlier this month, Anthropic launched customizable industry plugins for Claude Cowork — and the market responded immediately. Shares of Thomson Reuters, LegalZoom, RELX, FactSet, Salesforce, and Workday all dropped in a single week as investors questioned whether purpose-built AI agents could displace legacy enterprise software categories.
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush cautioned that enterprise adoption doesn't happen overnight. But Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid framed it more bluntly: we've shifted from "every tech stock is a winner" to "a true winners and losers landscape."
For enterprise technology buyers, the implication is stark: your current software stack is being competed against by AI systems that can learn your workflows, adapt to your industry, and execute tasks your legacy vendors never anticipated. The evaluation cycle has shortened dramatically.
2. OpenAI and Anthropic Are Now Directly Competing for Your Operating Infrastructure
The simultaneous release of Claude Opus 4.6 (with one-million-token context windows and "agent teams" that divide and conquer complex work) and GPT-5.3-Codex (OpenAI's most capable agentic coding model) within an hour of each other signals something important: both companies believe enterprise operating infrastructure is the prize.
This isn't about chatbots anymore. It's about whether Claude or ChatGPT becomes the underlying intelligence layer that your company's workflows run on. The companies that get embedded into your ERP, your CRM, your data warehouse, and your decision pipelines will be extraordinarily difficult to displace.
If you don't have a point of view on which AI infrastructure your organization is building around, someone else is making that decision for you — by default.
3. The Intelligence Layer Is the Real Battleground
While OpenAI and Anthropic dominate the headlines, a quieter and potentially more important battle is being fought at the enterprise data layer. Glean's CEO Arvind Jain articulated it well this week: "AI models don't understand anything about your business. They don't know who the different people are, what kind of work you do, what kind of products you build."
Glean's proposition — connecting the generative power of frontier models with the specific operational context of a company (its people, its processes, its institutional knowledge) — is arguably the most defensible enterprise AI position. The company that wins this layer owns the relationship between your data and every AI model you'll ever use.
For CTOs and CIOs evaluating AI vendors, this is a critical lens: who controls the context layer between your data and the model? That's where the long-term value and the long-term risk both live.
4. Security-First, Enterprise-Native AI Is a Real and Growing Market
Cohere's $240 million ARR milestone — and its 50%+ quarter-over-quarter growth — tells an important story that gets buried under the OpenAI-Anthropic drama. Enterprise buyers are actively choosing AI vendors who let them maintain data governance, run models on their own infrastructure, and avoid the regulatory and reputational risks of sending sensitive data to third-party APIs.
UCSF's deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise this month, complete with HIPAA compliance and P3/P4 data protection, is another signal: the question for healthcare, finance, and legal enterprise buyers isn't whether to adopt AI — it's which deployment architecture gives them the control they need to do so safely.
5. Global AI Governance Is No Longer a Background Conversation
Altman's call for an IAEA-style international body to govern AI — made in front of Prime Minister Modi, French President Macron, UN Secretary-General Guterres, and tech leaders from 100+ countries — marks a meaningful shift. The geopolitics of AI are now openly on the table.
For enterprise leaders, this matters because the regulatory environment for AI in 2026 and 2027 is going to look materially different from today. Companies that build governance, transparency, and compliance into their AI deployments now will not be caught flat-footed when those frameworks arrive with teeth.
The Strategic Question No One Is Asking Loudly Enough
Here's the framework I've been sharing with AAIA members in conversations over the past several months:
Most organizations are asking, "How do we use AI to do what we currently do, faster and cheaper?" That's a valid question. The productivity gains are real. But it's the wrong first question for 2026.
The right first question is: "What would this organization look like if it were designed from scratch today, assuming AI handles everything that doesn't require uniquely human judgment?"
The companies that answer that question honestly — and start redesigning around it — are the ones who will be unassailable in 36 months. The ones who treat AI as an efficiency overlay on existing processes will find themselves competing against organizations that have fundamentally different cost structures, decision speed, and capability profiles.
This isn't hypothetical. It's already happening in insurance, in logistics, in financial services, and increasingly in healthcare. The window for deliberate, strategic AI redesign — before the competitive landscape hardens — is closing.
What This Means for the AAIA Community
At the Applied AI Association, this is exactly the conversation we exist to facilitate — not the hype, not the hand-wringing, but the grounded, practitioner-level exchange between the people building AI solutions and the enterprise leaders deploying them.
Which is exactly why we're excited to announce the Immerse Global Summit — Enterprise Edition, coming to San Francisco, California on April 14–15, 2026, hosted at the Verizon Innovation Lab.
This is a curated, practitioner-focused gathering of AI and immersive technology leaders built around one principle: practical deployments, measurable ROI, and procurement-ready case studies — not hype. With a capacity of 175 attendees and 6–9 exhibitors, every conversation in that room is a signal conversation.
We are actively seeking speakers and sponsors for this event.
If you're deploying AI in the enterprise right now and have results to share, we want you on that stage. If your company sells AI solutions to enterprise buyers, this is the room where deals get started.
AAIA members receive 2 FREE tickets to the San Francisco event — plus 30% off additional passes for your team.
Join Us in San Francisco
📍 Verizon Innovation Lab | San Francisco, CA 📅 April 14–15, 2026 🎤 Apply to Speak → 🤝 Explore Sponsorship → 🎟 Register (Members: Use Your Free Tickets) →
The full 2026 IGS Series also includes upcoming Enterprise Edition 2 in Orlando, FL (Q3), a Healthcare Edition in Boston, MA (Q3), and a Media & Entertainment Edition in Los Angeles, CA (Q4). AAIA members receive free or discounted access to all editions.
The Bottom Line
Sam Altman may be wrong about 2028. But the direction he's pointing — toward a world where AI holds a staggering share of cognitive capacity — is a direction confirmed by everything we see happening in enterprise deployments, model capabilities, funding, and market disruption right now.
The leaders who wait for certainty will still be waiting when the landscape has already changed around them. The leaders who act on probability — who redesign their organizations, evaluate their technology stacks, build governance frameworks, and enga