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

AI is now being treated as essential economic infrastructure, and Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, says most organizations have barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

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

Fryar, who has been OpenAI’s CFO since June 2024, highlighted “capability backlog” as a concept that continued to emerge at Davos — the gap between what AI can actually do and the value organizations actually capture. According to Fryar, there is a mismatch between today’s powerful AI capabilities and the relatively shallow way most people and businesses use them, where advanced tools are still only minimally integrated into real workflows and decision-making.

“Experience and implementation will close this gap faster than any amount of rhetoric,” she wrote. “At OpenAI, we see novice users using seven times the amount of intelligence as the average user – they delve into programming, deep research, and pushing models to become truly thought partners.”

Along these lines, OpenAI recently released new research titled “Ending Capacity Redundancy” that documents this phenomenon. The researchers noted that there is a clear gap at the country level that is not driven by income alone. In the more than 70 countries where ChatGPT is widely used, some countries use advanced AI features three times more per capita than others.

Interestingly, while large economies like the United States and India have the largest number of total users, and small wealthy countries like Singapore and the Netherlands use AI the most per capita, the adoption of advanced AI is spreading everywhere, according to the researchers. Meanwhile, countries like Pakistan and Vietnam are among the world’s largest users of agents, using them at more than double the average.

In essence, some countries are already using AI to tackle harder problems and move faster, regardless of their resources. These early adopters are seeing real productivity gains — their workers can focus on more complex work, new products and services, and accelerate innovation in ways that drive economic growth and improve living standards, OpenAI found.

Another moment that resonated with the monk in Davos was the World Economic Forum’s CFO meeting, which “reinforced how realistic financial leaders are,” she wrote, adding that there is “widespread conviction that AI is inevitable, but deployment hinges on ROI, clean data, and simpler systems; that is the change management challenge, not the belief gap.”

This focus on tangible results is reflected in OpenAI’s recent performance. In an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo last week, Friar said: “An IPO is not out of the question; it’s just a question of when.”

OpenAI was valued at about $500 billion in its most recent stock sale. In 2023, revenue reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue; It rose to $6 billion in 2024 and jumped to more than $20 billion in 2025, according to a January 18 Friar blog post.

This revenue growth closely tracks the expansion in computing power. OpenAI’s computing capacity increased from 0.2 GW in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024 and about 1.9 GW in 2025.

Beyond investments in infrastructure, OpenAI is also expanding into new consumer-facing areas. Earlier this month, the company announced the debut of ChatGPT Health, a personalized experience within ChatGPT where it says users can securely connect medical records and health apps like Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal to further personalize conversations. The company stated that it will not train its models on personal medical data. luck I mentioned.

The company’s strategy of combining infrastructure expansion with practical, domain-specific applications reflects the pragmatic approach to AI deployment that Fryar observed among financial sector leaders in Davos.

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com

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2026-01-27 21:03:00