OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said Monday that we’re at a “tipping point” in enterprise artificial intelligence adoption, and the startup’s new Deployment Company will help with the push to get more companies on board.
“Think about the complex workflows, about how you actually build a product service, a product market, a product, and this structure of this company is going to allow us to do that at speed and scale,” Dresser told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
OpenAI announced the new business unit on Monday, which included the acquisition of applied AI consulting firm Tomoro. The OpenAI Development Company is a partnership with 19 investment and consultancy firms, including Bain, Goldman Sachs and SoftBank, and is majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI.
The Tomoro acquisition will bring about 150 engineers specializing in deploying frontier AI models into OpenAI’s umbrella to work with clients. These forward-deployed engineers will help businesses with AI adoption.
“Forward-deployed engineers can sit with an organization, sit with their users, understand the workflow, and then help them take that capability from their back-office applications, connecting it to the model, and then really building intelligence in terms of each of the workflow,” Dresser told CNBC.
Dresser’s comments come as the race for enterprise customers heats up, with OpenAI rival Anthropic the leader and Google also a player in the space with Gemini.
Last week, Anthropic said it was partnering with Goldman Sachs as well as Blackstone to launch a $1.5 billion firm aimed at tackling faster AI adoption across hundreds of companies.
Dresser, who was previously CEO at Slack, was hired as OpenAI’s chief revenue officer in December.
Enterprise now makes up more than 40% of OpenAI’s revenue, Dresser revealed in an April blog post, adding that the startup expects that portion of the business to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026.
Last month, Dresser sent a memo to staffers touting OpenAI’s recent alliance with Amazon Web Services through their cloud platform Bedrock, and putting a little distance between the startup and longtime partner Microsoft.
“Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock,” Dresser wrote in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering.”
CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
