OpenAI outlines three-stage strategy for market dominance

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has outlined a three-stage strategic vision to establish dominance in the business sector. During the DevDay conference in San Francisco, Altman detailed a plan consisting of: first, providing top-tier AI models; second, enabling developers to build applications easily; and third, creating a marketplace that connects corporate clients.

Internally, OpenAI is seeing a massive surge in the use of AI coding agents. Research department costs, calculated based on external API pricing, have risen significantly; average daily usage per researcher grew from $162 in July 2026 to over $600 in August 2026. Some high-volume researchers consume more than $7,000 worth of tokens per day.

While these tools have increased efficiency and reduced the need for human technical support, the high cost of token consumption has led some companies, such as Meta and Amazon, to discourage unproductive ‘tokenmaxxing’—the practice of using excessive AI resources without corresponding output gains.