OpenAI Launches Deployment Blitz w/Partners, FDEs

**Bob Evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends, welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Well, a couple weeks ago, we talked about some moves made by OpenAI to capitalize on their booming business in the enterprise. One of the things just to offer some context here is OpenAI said about a month ago that 40% of their revenue now comes from the enterprise, but by the end of the year, they expect that 50% enterprise business. So by that point, it'll be, if not the larger part of OpenAI's business, it'll at least be equal with the consumer side and it'll be the fastest growing.
Estimates are that OpenAI is currently on a run rate for the year will be about 25, 30 billion. So their enterprise business will be getting well into the double digit billions by the end of this year. So they're going to have lots of customers. They said they've added a million customers in the business customers in the last 12 months. Those companies are not going to be sitting around tinkering for months and quarters trying to figure out to want to rapidly get to the right business outcome. So OpenAI has launched a couple of go to market initiatives here focused around deployment. And they're doing this in two separate, but I would say closely coordinated ways. One is with partner ecosystem. The other is with OpenAI's own forward deployed engineers. Let's take a look at each of those. We'll start with the OpenAI Partner Network, which was launched earlier this week.
And again, the key here, they want to get these partners in place up and running, so they're not just selling, but that they understand the strategic initiatives that the customers have. So they'll be on the technology side, but also to help those customers understand how's our organization going to change? What are some new business processes? What are some new capabilities we can have? And I think this is a great step forward, so it isn't just saying, here's people that will sell something, take a check, and then say goodbye to the customer. Quite the opposite. They're going to be with them deeply to help guide these AI transformations.
OpenAI has set up a $150 million fund in this OpenAI Partner Network to support the initiatives of these partners as they go through, to help them move quickly, get the resources they need, and establish the right sort of capabilities to work with customers to get these high level outcomes. And also, the OpenAI Partner Network says that they want to certify 300,000 consultants by the end of the year on OpenAI's technology for businesses. Now, they've probably got some of these in place already, not that many. We're about halfway through the year. So, you know, roughly, that's close to 50,000 certified consultants per month starting July 1st through the end of the year. That's at a very ambitious pace. And I think that reflects what we're seeing about the ambitions of OpenAI in the enterprise. They want to be a big, big time player. And this Partner Network is headed by Colleen Capze, who was the Vice President of the ecosystem over at Google Cloud. Before that, it's Snowflake. She's helped set up a couple of great programs there. She's now leading the way at OpenAI.
Now, the second sort of part of this two-part deployment effort is the OpenAI Deployment Company, launched about a month ago. And this is one where OpenAI is the majority owner, but they've also taken lots of outside investments from other companies, including investment firms, consultancies, and also systems integrators. So, the consultancies and the systems integrators will have a very strong vested interest to work closely with their customers, introduce them to what OpenAI has going on here.
Great synergies there. Currently, the four deployed engineers, they have come from OpenAI's acquisition of Tomorrow.
That is an AI engineering and deployment company that currently has 150 four deployed engineers. And OpenAI says they want to crank that up to 250 very rapidly. So, you know, it was OpenAI that set off the, you know, Gen.AI revolution about three and a half years ago with the launch. At the time, the latest version of ChatGPT really got things cranking up on this end. And I think what we see here now is the coming together of a lot of their plans for how they want to build out, not just the great technology that OpenAI is creating, but also the go-to-market plans oriented around customers and customers' needs, their expectations, the new sort of skills they'll have to have in overseeing everything across the company, not just the technology deployment really, but the deployment of these big plans. They have to turn these companies into AI-powered, highly capable leaders in their industries for the future. Got a detailed article about this a little later this morning on cloudwars.com. I hope you'll check that out. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.