OpenAI is reportedly bolstering sales staff amid a “paradigm shift” in corporate AI spending.
In an interview with The Information Wednesday (Nov. 27), OpenAI Chief Commercial Officer Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti said the company hopes to capitalize on that shift as it tries to achieve $100 billion in revenue by 2029.
The company has been landing new contracts with healthcare, manufacturing and legal companies, among them vaccine maker Moderna and home improvement company Lowe’s, Lionetti told the publication.
And to close similar deals, the report said, the artificial intelligence (AI) giant has been bolstering its sales team, which now accounts for close to 20% of its 1,600-member workforce.
The report notes that OpenAI competes for corporate business with the likes of Microsoft — its largest investor — and Google, and thus has to counter their ability to offer security and compliance guarantees.
“If you look at our road map forward, security is a huge focus for us, and that’s how we represent it to our customers as well,” Lionetti said.
The Information noted that some companies are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a catch-all to replace legacy software and asked Lionetti if he was seeing the same thing.
“We believe AI products are truly a paradigm shift, and that starts to unlock these new ways of working that you’re referring to here,” he said. “Users and customers are finding a new way to work.”
He offered some examples of how that’s playing out, whether it means Lowe’s using the company’s APIs to help employees identify product description errors, or Arizona State University using ChatGPT for teaching and research.
“So we don’t want to think too far ahead, but when you think of AI as a technology, we’ve been at the frontier of that, and the whole goal is to have a true paradigm shift, and that’s what you’re seeing,” Lionetti said.
The news comes as enterprise spending on generative AI is booming, reaching $13.8 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2023, according to venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
“2024 marks the year that generative AI became a mission-critical imperative for enterprise,” Joff Redfern, partner at Menlo Ventures, said last week. “The numbers tell a dramatic story of organizations moving beyond pilots to embedding AI at the core of their business strategies.”
The same is true in the financial sector, with research by PYMNTS Intelligence and NCR Voyix collaboration showing that 72% of finance leaders are actively using AI in their operations.
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