• by Laurie Sullivan , October 13, 2025

Apple is facing a new rival in the AI era -- OpenAI -- and will need to make changes in the way company executives think about apps, John Sculley, former Apple CEO, said during a panel at Zeta Global's conference.

Sculley recently retired from his role as cofounder and vice chairman of Zeta. He is the creator of the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against Coca-Cola, in order to gain market share.

Sculley said Steve Jobs built the Macintosh to use apps as tools that empowered people, which he called “knowledge workers.”

“It’s all about the agentic era where agentic AI becomes the intelligence,” Sculley said.

The agentic era has changed workflow automation, handing more of the process to machines. Workflow automation today is what large language models (LLMs) do.

Apple has about 30 million app developers developing apps, but in the agentic era, “we don’t need a lot of apps," he said. "It will be done with smart agents working across workflow automation.”

Sculley said AI has not been Apple’s strength. He pointed to OpenAI’s acquisition of Johnny Ives’s hardware startup, io products. Ives designed and built many Apple products — iMac, iPhone, iPad — company for $6.4 billion.

Jim Lanzone, CEO at Yahoo, also joined the panel. He said that without a healthy source of content and apps, the world will end up with synthetic data.

“It’s important that the open internet not be left behind,” Lanzone said. “All the information that the LLMs have sucked up without asking came from the open internet. That’s what gave them their knowledge.”

Companies have tried to make deals for that data and content. Lanzone said in some cases data skimmed from LLMs do not link back, which has been the “social contract of how the internet has existed.”