From podcasts to fatherhood, here’s how CEOs are using AI

Microsoft has invested heavily in AI, including introducing its Copilot assistant in 2023, inking a $13 billion partnership with OpenAI in 2024, and creating teams dedicated to developing the tech.

CEO Satya Nadella, who took charge of the company in 2014, previously discussed how recent developments in AI will change workflows and humans’ cognitive labor. For Nadella, AI has become a necessary part of his life, both in and out of the office, according to Bloomberg.

During an interview published in May, Nadella said he enjoys podcasts but doesn’t listen to them. Instead, he uploads the transcripts of podcasts to the Copilot app on his phone so he can discuss the content with a voice assistant during his commute.

When he reaches Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, Nadella uses Copilot to summarize his Outlook and Teams messages. He utilizes at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio to help with meeting prep and research.

“I’m an email typist,” Nadella told the outlet.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent tech giants thanks to OpenAI‘s premier product, ChatGPT.

The company launched a chatbot demo in 2022, and it quickly went viral on social media as people inquired about everything from diets to recipes. Over the last three years, OpenAI has shared more advanced GPT programs with users and is working to expand its global reach despite competition from Chinese tech companies like DeepSeek.

This January, President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion private-sector investment in AI infrastructure called Stargate. OpenAI was among the companies asked to help with that project.

So, it’s unsurprising that Altman uses AI to streamline tasks his his personal life. Altman appeared on Adam Grant’s “ReThinking” podcast this January, saying, “Honestly, I use it in the boring ways.”

Altman said the AI bots help him process emails or summarize documents. The tech has also helped him with fatherhood.

During an OpenAI podcast interview published this month, Altman said he used AI “constantly” after welcoming his first child in February.

“Clearly, people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time,” Altman said. “I don’t know how I would have done that.”

Now, Altman said he mostly uses ChatGPT to research developmental stages.

Another major player on the global tech scene is Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO. The California-based company is one of the most valuable in the world, with a market value of over $3 trillion, according to Google Finance. The company is focused on designing and manufacturing hardware, including chips and graphical processing units to assist AI.

During the 28th annual Milken Institute Global Conference in May, Huang told the audience he uses AI programs to learn new concepts.

“I use it as a tutor every day,” Huang said. “In areas that are fairly new to me, I might say, ‘Start by explaining it to me like I’m a 12-year-old,’ and then work your way up into a doctorate-level over time.”

AI’s ability to rapidly collect, analyze, and communicate information could close the tech gap, according to Huang.

“In this room, it’s very unlikely that more than a handful of people know how to program with C++,” Huang said. “Yet 100% of you know how to program an AI, and the reason for that is because the AI will speak whatever language you wanted to speak.”

In a 2024 interview with Wired, Huang said he uses Perplexity and ChatGPT “almost every day” for research.

“For example, computer-aided drug discovery. Maybe you would like to know about the recent advancements in computer-aided drug discovery,” Huanng said. “And so you want to frame the overall topic so that you could have a framework, and from that framework, you could ask more and more specific questions. I really love that about these large language models.”

Apple is navigating the global AI market under CEO Tim Cook, who announced Apple Intelligence — a generative AI system — at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2024. He also unveiled a slew of other AI-based features at the time, including the Image Playground and the ability to remove unwanted background details from photos.

Cook, who became CEO in 2011, publicly spoke about how he uses AI day-to-day in a 2024 interview with The Wall Street Journal. He said Apple Intelligence helps him summarize long emails.

“If I can save time here and there, it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month,” Cook told the outlet. “It’s changed my life,” he says. “It really has.”

One year earlier, Cook appeared on “Good Morning America” and said he was “excited” about developments in AI.

“I think there’s some unique applications for it and you can bet that it’s something that we’re looking at closely,” Cook said.

Real estate tech companies like Zillow are also leaning into AI. The company announced in 2023 that it implemented an “AI-powered natural-language search” to help users navigate the website.

CEO Jeremy Wacksman, like the other executives, has begun using AI to be more efficient.

“I spend a lot of time either catching up on meetings I’ve missed or on asynchronous documentation,” Wacksman told The New York Times Dealbook. “You can tell ChatGPT, ‘Treat me like my role. Here’s all this data — summarize it for me the way I would need to know going forward,’ and you can get a personalized summary. That’s just — that’s far more valuable to me than to try to read a transcript at one-and-a-half speed or watch a video at one-and-a-half speed.”

Wacksman added that he wants Zillow staffers to experiment with the technology.

“We’ve had what we call ‘AI days,’ where we showcase work and celebrate examples,” Wacksman said. “We’ve also started weaving it into our bigger meetings, like product reviews: When a product manager-design-engineering team is prototyping, oftentimes, they’re now using an AI tool called Replit. They’re prototyping really quickly to get something in front of a user.”