AI to ROI: OpenAI - The Most Important AI Company in the World, and the Most Fragile

**Peter Buchanan** (0:08)
Hey, welcome to AI to ROI, the Big Story edition. I am Peter Buchanan, the managing partner of Newplan, and I am joined by the maestro of metrics, Ray Rike, the CEO of Benchmarkit. Ray, it's great to be with you.

**Ray Rike** (0:22)
Peter, it's always great to do this, and I'm really interested and excited about today's story, because we're going to dive deep into the OpenAI business. And I think it's an important one, and it's important to an industry that's still in the early stages, and probably a company that could have the most potential impact to our listeners over the next 12 to 24 months.

**Peter Buchanan** (0:47)
Oh, no doubt. So they're the most important company in AI history by far. They're valued at over $850 billion.
And they're also in serious trouble in multiple fronts. They had these wondrous things going on, including the model release and the Image 2 release this week, and the Agents release this week, and yet they have lots of storm clouds too. Yeah.

**Ray Rike** (1:13)
And I think this goes beyond noise for our listening audience, Peter, because the executives here are making AI use and deployment decisions that's strategically critical to their business. And I think it's important to understand OpenAI in context of the entire landscape. You know, Gemini with Google and Anthropic with Claude, et cetera. So they make the right decisions now that could have real impact in the future. Remember when cloud costs first started surprising people?
Finance would open the AWS invoice. No one could explain what drove it. And engineering would spend a week building a spreadsheet to explain it. And it was still wrong.
AI is doing that again, except faster, more dynamic and spread across more systems and departments. Today, a single enterprise has multiple AI costs running across multiple vendors such as AWS, inference costs on Anthropic and OpenAI, GitHub co-pilot cursor and a handful of AI agents that no one billing system sees the entire spend picture.
So finance asked, what did we spend on AI this month? And the answer takes three days to find out and it's still probably wrong. And what did we get for it? Most don't even try to answer that one. That is the problem Maverick was built for. Maverick gives finance, IT, and engineering a single source of truth for AI spend. So you can allocate costs, enforce budgets, and connect investments to business outcomes. Learn more at maverick.ai, that's M-A-V-V-R-I-K dot AI. Now on to the show.

**Peter Buchanan** (2:50)
Right.
So what we're going to do today on our very ambitious podcast episode is we are going to go through and we're going to look at six documented challenges that OpenAI faces. And we're going to look at their IPO prospects.
And then we have six recommended specific actions that you and I think could really improve their prospects and performance going forward. And so I think let's just dive in Ray, get started.

**Ray Rike** (3:20)
Okay. So the first thing we talked about discussing today is, you know, why should OpenAI be winning this race and generative AI?
So you know me, I'm the numbers guy. So let's put some numbers behind this. So their annualized recurring revenue. Notice I say annualized because for all the list of the audience out there, the little trick I've seen is every time you see, you know, 19 billion from Anthropic and then 30 billion, it's always an annualized run rate where they take the last month and they multiply it by 12 Still impressive, but just so everyone knows that.

**Peter Buchanan** (3:55)
Right, it's not a gap financial statement.

**Ray Rike** (3:58)
It is not gap. It's more like funky ARR calculations. But, you know, they stand about 25 billion dollar run rate. So that's pretty amazing because if you think about it, most people learned about OpenAI late November of 2022 when ChatGPT was launched. So that's a pretty incredible scaling and run rate.
Next, they have almost 910 million weekly active users and over a million businesses run on OpenAI. So this is a consequential company in a very short time, Peter.

**Peter Buchanan** (4:36)
Yeah, just three and a half years, really. I mean, they were sort of a quiet lab before that release. And the other way to really think about them is Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Oracle, all these run by these revered CEOs. They've all signed 9 and 10 figure partnerships and invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI.
So there's something to believe in here. And when OpenAI ships a major product, work across the industry stops, like buyers, partners, competitors. They all dive in to see what they actually release. That's happened in the last couple of days.