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OpenAI’s push into the enterprise market is ramping up as it faces increasing pressure to prove that AI can actually deliver for big businesses.
The artificial intelligence giant in recent months has invested $150 million in a new enterprise partner program and launched the OpenAI Deployment Co., a stand-alone services firm that will embed technical expertise with business customers.
Both programs will employ forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, that work on-site with clients to plan and build AI applications. The workflow has gained traction in the AI era as many enterprises struggle to turn AI model access into applications that work inside their day-to-day operations.
“There’s never been a greater gap between the model capacity and what people use them for,” said Arnaud Fournier, an OpenAI veteran who now serves as chief technology officer of the OpenAI Deployment Co., or DeployCo.
The enterprise segment has become an increasingly vital portion of OpenAI’s business and one where it will need to continue growing to meet revenue targets, justify heavy infrastructure spending and ultimately satisfy public markets.
But there are challenges.
OpenAI faces intense competition, not only from Anthropic and other frontier model makers, but from those offering a new crop of increasingly sophisticated open-source or open-weight models. At the same time, business leaders are already balking at AI costs and trying to put a tighter leash around their spending, some questioning the extent to which AI is actually able to deliver value today.
OpenAI’s DeployCo aims to help them answer that question. The firm launched in May with the acquisition of AI consulting and engineering firm Tomoro, which brought in a team of 150. Since then it also acquired applied AI firm Northslope, bringing the total number of FDEs into the hundreds. Fournier said a small group from OpenAI’s own internal FDE organization will be temporarily on loan to DeployCo to support it scaling up.
A blueprint
DeployCo said it is still choosing its first customers, and will be giving priority to those with longstanding relationships with OpenAI. But the startup’s earlier work sending FDEs into the field offers a preview of what to expect from its newest FDE venture.
BBVA has been one beneficiary.
Fran Martínez López, head of risk transformation at BBVA, said an OpenAI engineer helped the Madrid-based bank build a new AI application for credit risk analysis, something his team had been working on for months. The work was part of an effort to leverage AI and agents throughout the bank’s risk division.
“They told us: This is the way of building these kinds of solutions. And this is the way of using this technology,” López said.
The FDE gave BBVA a new blueprint for how to improve the accuracy and consistency of the solution’s answers, including a new set of AI agents to evaluate and approve the responses of other AI agents. As a result, the tool climbed from less than 60% accuracy to 80%, he said.
Colin Jarvis, who heads up OpenAI’s internal FDE program, said FDEs can join an organization for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Depending on the length of the engagement, they might build proof of concepts or help fully deploy solutions across the organization, Jarvis said. Anywhere from one to five FDEs might embed with a given team, he said.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Flooding the zone
OpenAI’s original FDE team, designed to work with customers on core research problems that then could be used to improve their own products, never had the scale or capacity to meet all incoming demand, according to DeployCo’s Fournier, who previously spent four years leading a group of 100-some OpenAI FDEs.
DeployCo, which will remain majority-owned by OpenAI and operate as part of the OpenAI ecosystem, is being seeded with a $4 billion investment led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners. B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Warburg Pincus and WCAS are founding partners.
OpenAI declined to comment on how much it invested itself in DeployCo or whether DeployCo’s revenue will count toward OpenAI’s revenue.
“Ultimately, we think that the addressable market for AI services is going to be a multihundred-billion-dollar addressable market over time,” said Peter McGoohan, a partner at TPG. “We’re solving a fundamental problem that exists right now in terms of AI adoption in enterprise.”
Anthropic, which announced its own partner program in March, also has an FDE offering it calls its Applied AI team. Microsoft and Amazon in recent weeks have made announcements around their own FDE programs.
Enter the consultants
FDEs may not be the answer for all enterprise AI woes, according to Arun Chandrasekaran, Gartner distinguished VP analyst.
While AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are capable from a technology standpoint, “they don’t have the eyes and ears of the board of directors and the C-suite, and they’re not able to talk about digital transformation and business transformation at that level,” he said.
An OpenAI representative said the company talks to boards of companies all the time about their perspective on their AI transformation.
But to cover all bases, OpenAI is putting $150 million into its new partner network, where consultants like Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Accenture help sell and deploy its tools inside businesses.
While OpenAI’s partner network will have an FDE component as well, Vikas Taneja, a global leader of partnerships and alliances at BCG, said a key advantage of the partners is that they help enterprises with bigger organizational challenges like change management.
“It takes a trusted ecosystem of partners to help turn our frontier models and products into real business impact,” said Colleen Kapase, OpenAI’s vice president of global partnerships and ecosystem.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at [email protected] and Belle Lin at [email protected]
