OpenAI Wins Business Clients With Not-So-Secret Weapon: ChatGPT

"OpenAI is aiming to use its popular chatbot ChatGPT -- it said 600,000 individuals pay for business versions of it -- as a way to gain an entry into businesses and sell them its enterprise artificial-intelligence services.

Those individuals are paying for ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Team, which make up what OpenAI calls its "business products," according to OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. 

ChatGPT Enterprise is aimed at large companies with over 100 employees, and ChatGPT Team is geared at smaller firms with fewer than 100 employees, OpenAI said.

OpenAI said it doesn't disclose the number of businesses that pay for its services. It said 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using ChatGPT in some form, and 100 million people actively use ChatGPT on a weekly basis.

"We want to go maximize the number of companies that have a ChatGPT license, but if people are not actually using the technology underneath, then who cares? It's shelfware," Lightcap said in an interview.

The San Francisco AI company, which has been at the center of the current boom in generative AI, is up against many well-funded competitors in pursuing business customers, including tech giant Microsoft, its primary backer and partner.

Unlike innovations in previous tech booms, generative AI is ideally suited for transforming the way businesses operate -- and a growing number of firms are looking to cash in on it.

Owing much to its relationship with Microsoft, OpenAI has become one of the de facto vendors companies initially use to test generative AI, many chief information officers say. 

But increasingly, open-source models from companies such as Meta Platforms -- which can be less expensive to use -- are also putting pressure on OpenAI's lead.

While OpenAI said it doesn't have a market-share figure, it referenced venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's survey, which found that 100% of the 70 enterprises it surveyed are using OpenAI's models in some capacity, with 66% using its models in their operations, and 34% in testing.

With such a broad base of users -- whether corporate IT-sanctioned or not -- bringing ChatGPT into their workplaces, Lightcap said the chatbot is an "efficient" way for businesses to quickly understand the benefits of applying generative AI at work.

"Once you've introduced this appreciation for AI in your enterprise, through a product like ChatGPT, you're starting to give your workforce an appreciation for how the model works," he said.

Software companies have similarly aimed to sell their products through a "bottoms-up" or "freemium" approach, by which individual employees or developers bring free or paid tools into their workplaces -- thereby opening the door for vendors to upsell corporate executives on a packaged solution.

OpenAI now has a team of about 200 developers, researchers, and sales and support staff to help directly sell its AI technology to companies, according to Lightcap, making its discussions with CIOs, chief technology officers and chief executives, "a very direct sales motion."

That figure is dwarfed by the size of enterprise sales groups at large, legacy software firms, which can number a thousand or more.

The most common business-use cases, so far, are "workforce enablement" or employee productivity, and companies that use OpenAI's models to power their own products, such as customer support platforms, Lightcap said.

Home-improvement retailer Lowe's is using a custom version of OpenAI's GPT-4 model to improve search results on its website, and insurer Oscar Health used OpenAI models to build an assistant for managing claims, OpenAI said.

ChatGPT Enterprise is priced based on the number of users at a company, and ChatGPT Team costs $30 a month for each user when billed monthly." [1]

1. OpenAI Wins Business Clients With Not-So-Secret Weapon: ChatGPT. Lin, Belle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Apr 2024: B.4.