“The next generation of AI won't just answer questions. It will do work.”
“We're building a general-purpose AI teammate. Not a chatbot, not an assistant -- a teammate that can use every tool a knowledge worker uses.”
“The gap between what AI can understand and what it can do is the most important gap to close in the next few years.”
“Language models that can only produce text are like having a brilliant colleague who can advise but never actually do anything.”
“The future is models that interact with the digital world the way humans do -- clicking, typing, navigating.”
David Luan represents the agentic AI paradigm — the belief that AI’s most transformative applications will come not from chat interfaces but from systems that can take real actions in software. As former VP of Engineering at OpenAI and founder of Adept AI, he has been one of the earliest and most articulate advocates for AI agents that can operate computers on behalf of users.
Luan’s departure from OpenAI to found Adept in 2022 reflected a conviction that the chatbot paradigm was insufficient. While the world was captivated by ChatGPT’s conversational abilities, Luan was already building toward the next step: AI that does not just tell you how to do something but actually does it.
His distinction between AI that can answer and AI that can act captures a fundamental transition in the industry’s trajectory. The first wave of commercial AI success (2022-2024) was built on models that generate text. The next wave, which Luan was early to identify, involves models that interact with software interfaces, execute multi-step workflows, and accomplish concrete tasks.
Adept’s approach — training models to use existing software tools through their normal interfaces — represented an alternative to the API-integration approach that many competitors pursued. Rather than requiring applications to build AI integrations, Adept aimed to build AI that could use any application as-is.
The challenge Luan faced was building a commercially viable product in a market where the underlying technology was advancing so rapidly that yesterday’s breakthrough became tomorrow’s baseline feature. This competitive dynamic led to Adept being acquired by Amazon in 2024, but Luan’s early vision for agentic AI proved prescient as the entire industry moved in the direction he had identified.