OpenAI Enterprise Biggest, Fastest-Growing Unit By End of 2026

**Bob Evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Early this year, OpenAI jumped into the Cloud Wars Top 10 in the number 10 spot. It's a little tricky. I generally do not include privately held companies on the Cloud Wars Top 10 because there's just a lack of financial transparency that makes it hard to gauge exactly where these privately held companies stand. But because of the impact OpenAI has had, moving from the ChatGPT explosion three and a half years ago up to now, their move very aggressively in the enterprise, I feel that they are a player of a major type with huge potential, both in what they're doing themselves and the partnerships they have, and also the competitors that they're going to make along the way. So there was an event last week, or an event this week, sorry, that OpenAI held with some customers talking about their enterprise strategy, their direction, their developments, and what's going on. I wanted to share a few of the highlights from that. The biggest one turns out to be that right now, the enterprise part of the OpenAI business, as opposed to the consumer part with the early ChatGPT and all, the enterprise part of the business will very soon be the biggest, and I think it is currently the fastest growing part of OpenAI.
By the end of the year, that will absolutely be the case. The event was hosted by Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser. She had had a great 14-year career at Salesforce and Slack before joining OpenAI at the beginning of this year. She said that the enterprise revenue at OpenAI is now 40 percent of total revenue, and by the end of this year, six months from now, it will be 50 percent.
When it hits that, it will be at least half of the revenue, and that growth rate shows that it's not only the biggest, but the fastest growing. Now, if we try to quantify that a little, she said that OpenAI has two million enterprise customers right now. A year ago, she said it was one million. Now, two million customers, they're not all giant companies, they're not all paying OpenAI a lot of money, but what they're doing is seeding the way for future opportunities and growth. So, if we try to quantify, you know, what do these percentages mean here? How does that equate to raw dollars? Early this year, OpenAI hinted that they're on about a $25 billion run rate. And that was early this year. The growth rates they're talking about, they say there's never been a company growing at scale, the way that we have, the rate we have. You know, I think it's not all unreasonable. In fact, I think it's probably a conservative guess to say that they'll grow 60% this year, making that $25 billion run rate by the end of this year, $40 billion. And if that's the case, 50% of the $40 billion that goes to the enterprise, it'd be a $20 billion business at a fairly conservative guess. If you get more aggressive, you know, it could be upwards more close to $25 billion, which puts them, you know, makes them a bigger, faster growing enterprise AI software player than Workday, then Palantir, then ServiceNow, about as big as Oracle's software business and about as big as SAP's. So they could be, you know, the second biggest enterprise software player behind Salesforce.
Still not perfectly clear exactly where they're going. They do seem to be developing a very heavy industry-specific strategy that they're putting together. Financial services, health care are among two of their biggest that they're going after. And as I said, early this year, OpenAI joined the Cloud Wars Top 10 in the number 10 spot. There's lots of talk about, for both OpenAI and perhaps even Anthropic, having registered for IPOs. And if that comes to pass, the numbers would not only be astonishing for each company, but the requirements then for being a publicly traded company would open up a great deal of financial visibility for everyone to see exactly how big these companies are, where the money is coming in, their profitability, growth rates, and so forth. So this was an interesting peek into there. I've got a detailed article later this morning at cloudwars.com that talks about some customer touch points, some priorities that Denise Dresser discussed, that they've come across now with customers.
Among the big ones there were the enterprise focus, that these big customers see that there's a lot of potential in the technology that OpenAI has, but does OpenAI also have the capability to support this? One of the things Dresser said is by the end of this year, the OpenAI plans to have 300,000 trained consultants for OpenAI Enterprise business. So, a lot's happening there. Competition is great. It's going to make everybody better. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.