OpenAI’s Dresser says enterprise AI adoption is ‘at a tipping point’
OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said on Monday that we are at an “inflection point” in enterprise AI adoption, and the startup’s new Distribution Company It will help more companies join.
“Think about complex workflows, how you actually build a product service, product market, product, and this structure of this company will allow us to do that quickly and at scale,” Dresser told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
OpenAI announced the new business unit on Monday, which includes the acquisition of applied artificial intelligence consulting firm Tomoro. The OpenAI Development Company is a partnership of 19 investment and advisory firms, including Bain, Goldman Sachs and SoftBank, and is majority owned and controlled by OpenAI.
The acquisition of Tomoro will bring approximately 150 engineers who specialize in deploying advanced AI models into the OpenAI umbrella to work with customers. These forward-deployed engineers will help businesses embrace AI.
“Forward-deployed engineers can sit in an organization, sit with their users, understand the workflow, and then help them take that capability from back-office applications, plug it into the model, and then really build intelligence in terms of each workflow,” Dresser told CNBC.
Dresser’s comments come as the race for enterprise customers heats up, with OpenAI rival Anthropic leading the pack and Google also a player in the space with Gemini.
Last week, Anthropic announced it was partnering with Goldman Sachs and Blackstone to launch a $1.5 billion firm aimed at combating the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence across hundreds of companies.
Dresser, who was previously CEO at Slack, was hired as OpenAI’s chief revenue officer in December.
Enterprise currently accounts for more than 40% of OpenAI’s revenue, Dresser explained in an April blog post, adding that the startup expects that part of the business to reach the same level as consumer by the end of 2026.
Last month, Dresser sent a memo to employees touting OpenAI’s recent alliance with Amazon Web Services through its cloud platform Bedrock, putting some 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 businesses where they are; for many, that is Bedrock,” Dresser wrote in the note viewed by CNBC. “Since we announced our partnership at the end of February, the demand for this offering from our customers has been frankly staggering.”
CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
