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ZDNET Highlights
- OpenAI now has 1 million commercial customers.
- Customers report positive ROI, contrary to industry findings.
- ChatGPT for work seats grew by 40% in two months.
The promise of what productive AI can do for productivity has led businesses to invest substantial capital in AI products and services, creating a new, lucrative market for AI companies. OpenAI has launched new features and offerings to meet this demand – and it seems to be working.
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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced It has over one million business customers worldwide, which the company claims makes it the fastest growing business platform in history. This brings the company’s total ChatGPT for Work seats to seven million – a 40% increase in two months, and ninefold year-over-year growth in ChatGPT Enterprise seats.
How did OpenAI do this?
The company attributes this demand to some of its latest features, including Company Insights, which enables ChatGPT to reason across various company databases such as Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, and Codex – the company’s coding agent – which has seen a 10x increase in usage since August.
However, OpenAI also noted its potential to convert everyday users – more than 800 million per week – into committed business customers.
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“OpenAI gained its customer base by converting large-scale consumer use into the enterprise sales funnel,” Gartner analyst Chirag Decate told ZDNET. “This consumer-to-enterprise flywheel is supported by simple product offerings, like ChatGPS and direct API access to tasks.”
This year was also big for the company on the multimodal front. Just last month, OpenAI launched its most advanced and realistic video model, Sora 2. This model outperformed OpenAI’s own DALL-E 3, even producing accurate text. The company also recently released Realtime API and GPT-Realtime to help customers create realistic voice agents.
OpenAI vs competitors
These releases have helped OpenAI compete with Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft, which are also trying to capture the enterprise audience.
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Some, like Microsoft, have a unique advantage, as many businesses prefer to turn to their cloud provider for AI solutions. For example, a Wharton study found Except for ChatGPT, all top employer-paid subscriptions are aligned with the top primary cloud providers.
While it may be true that it may be convenient to provide customers with solutions already included in their projects, it may also make it more difficult for non-Microsoft users to adopt its tools.
“Microsoft continues to maintain its strategic moat of its deep dominance in enterprise accounts and a strong bundling strategy,” DeCate said. “Microsoft leverages its M365, security, and Azure data services as a huge distribution channel for Copilot.”
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Google’s advantage hinges more on DeepMind’s ability to create cutting-edge AI innovations like VO3, Nano Banana and the Gemini model, as well as “the breadth of its Vertex AI toolchain and integration with Workspace,” Descartes said.
Until now, OpenAI’s biggest competitor in the enterprise sector has been Anthropic, which currently serves 300,000 enterprise customers. According to Anthropic, the run-rate has totaled more than $100,000 in revenue, and has increased nearly sevenfold in the past year. To capture this audience, the company has relied heavily on its reputation as a safe and reliable AI tool, taking a careful approach to training on user data from the beginning and avoiding major scandals.
A twist in the ROI debate
One of the biggest topics of discussion in AI at the moment is a growing body of evidence failing to show its ROI for businesses that implement it. However, OpenAI did include examples in the blog post of how many of its enterprise customers are already seeing some payments.
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For example, the company wrote that Cisco reduced project timelines by 50% from weeks to days by using Codex. Meanwhile, Carlyle used OpenAI’s AgentKit assessment platform to reduce development time for Carlyle’s Multi-Agent Due Diligence Framework by more than 50%.
“New products like Company Knowledge and AgentKit are designed to reduce integration time and shorten deployment cycles. This dual approach of expanding reach and simplifying deployment has accelerated adoption. There is verified evidence that companies are seeing ROI in specific, high-value workflows,” Descartes said.
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Additionally, the same Wharton study found that the majority of enterprises achieve positive ROI, with tech and telecom reporting an 88% positive ROI, and banking/finance and business services reporting an 83% positive ROI. Other sectors see slightly lower returns, for example, the retail sector is seeing a 54% positive ROI.
