OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, held an all-hands meeting with staffers last week and said the company is committed to helping businesses, and is “orienting aggressively” towards high-productivity use cases.
OpenAI kickstarted the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, and the chatbot now supports more than 900 million weekly active users. But the company is still racing to grab market share, particularly in the enterprise, away from rivals like Google
and Anthropic, which is also weighing an IPO.
“Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users,” Simo said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting reviewed by CNBC. “We’ll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool.”
