While OpenAI became a global consumer superstar three and a half years ago when ChatGPT rocked the world, OpenAI’s new runaway growth engine is its enterprise business that currently generates 40% of total revenue and will spike to 50% by the end of 2026.
Although bits and pieces of OpenAI’s explosive growth story have dribbled out over the past year or two, the picture became a bit more clear this week as CRO Denise Dresser hosted an online event to share more of OpenAI’s strategy and expectations for its enterprise business.
I’ll detail those in a moment, but first I want to try to estimate/guess at the dollar amounts OpenAI’s breathtaking growth will produce:
- Earlier this year, various industry reports pegged OpenAI’s annualized run rate at about $25 billion.
- If that figure is close to accurate — and I believe it is — then if the company grows at a 60% rate this year, it will exit 2026 at a run rate of about $40 billion.
- That would mean that, using Dresser’s contention that OpenAI enterprise will account for 50% of total revenue by the end of the year, OpenAI’s enterprise run rate will be $20 billion —making it larger than Palantir, Workday, and ServiceNow among the Cloud Wars Top 10 players.
- That’s all based on my guess-timate of 60% growth this year — the actual growth rate for 2026 could turn out to be much higher, so it’s not unreasonable to think that just six months from now, the OpenAI enterprise business could be zipping along at a $25-billion clip.
Seem far-fetched? Well, Dresser said the number of OpenAI enterprise customers has doubled since last year, from one million to two million, as OpenAI has focused on meeting four specific needs of its business customers:
- Model capabilities: relentless improvements general intelligence, multimodal, and specialized;
- Ecosystem partners: Dresser said that by year-end, OpenAI will have 300,000 certified consultants working closely with customers. Key partners will include Accenture, McKinsey, Capgemini, BCG, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, and Bain, as well as its own OpenAI Deployment Co.;
- Enterprise scale: Dresser highlighted technical expertise, reliability, compute capacity (up 6X), and security and governance; and
- Enterprise focus: this is where Dresser again highlighted how enterprise customers currently account for 40% of total revenue but will push that total to 50% by year’s end.
One customer example shared by Dresser was Travelers Insurance, which said that 90% of customers who use its AI Assistant are able to fully complete the creation of a claim on their first call.
Travelers’ senior vice-president of auto and property claims Patrick Gee was quoted as saying, “What set OpenAI’s realtime model apart was the ability to perform in that environment.”
Dresser also had a brief fireside chat with BNY CEO Robin Vince, who said OpenAI’s technology has helped BNY fulfill its vision of deploying AI “for everyone, everywhere, and everything.
Of the many compelling thoughts Vince offered about the potential of AI, the most-significant one to me was his belief that leaders today have a stark choice with massive implications: they can be AI optimists, or AI pessimists.
And for those willing to take the optimist route and take responsibility for shaping the future, Vince said they’re likely to find that AI can be “the ultimate capacity creator” by helping people know more, do more, and serve customers better along the way.
Final Thought
Dresser, who joined OpenAI at the beginning of the year following 14 years in high-level roles at Salesforce, including two years as Slack CEO, said OpenAI’s ultimate ambition is to help customers conceive and deploy “new operating models” as they define what the “company of the future” will be.
I like that level of ambition, particularly in times as consequential as those we’re undergoing now. And while sharing a vision of what the company hopes to become is far from fully delivering, Dresser set a high bar for what customers need to be thinking about.
“That requires a mindset that’s focused on the exponential, not the incremental,” Dresser said, requiring not only a sweeping technological overhaul but also and most importantly “a human transformation.”
Buckle up tight, folks!
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