The leading AI labs are narrowing in on the most likely viable business model: selling their tools to businesses.
What happened: OpenAI is pivoting its strategy to focus on serving software developers and enterprise customers, and its leadership has told employees that they can no longer be “distracted by side quests,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front,” Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of applications, told staff.
OpenAI is also in talks with some of the world’s largest private equity firms to distribute its tools to their portfolio companies through a joint venture.
Why it’s happening: OpenAI is widely regarded as having fallen behind Anthropic in the enterprise market, particularly after an update to Claude Code late last year that improved its coding ability.
While OpenAI has shipped a slew of consumer products, like its video generator Sora and e-commerce features in ChatGPT, Anthropic quietly became the leader among enterprise customers, capturing 40% market share compared to OpenAI’s 27%.
Why it matters: For now at least, OpenAI’s approach of building AI tools for regular consumers appears to have hit a dead end. It’s now come around to Anthropic’s theory that the most realistic path to profitability (or at least to losing money less quickly) is by getting more businesses to use their products.
Our take: The top AI companies are now directing their considerable resources to getting more businesses to use their products. There’s a good chance that will lead to more companies adopting AI sooner than they otherwise might have — and accelerate the impact on white-collar workers.—TS