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When it comes to impact and brand recognition in the AI space right now, you'd be hard-pressed to find many bigger names than OpenAI.
However as it nears the landmark of a billion weekly active users, the ChatGPT maker isn't just gunning for our home and personal lives, but wants to rule the enterprise space too.
To find out more, I spoke to Ashley Kramer, OpenAI’s Enterprise VP, to run through both its latest releases, and also its plans for the future.
"A lot of uplift"
Kramer was speaking to me following the company’s Frontier event, which saw 200 enterprise customers from across the UK and European region share their experience of working with OpenAI.
“We're seeing lots of momentum in Europe,” she notes, “specifically, we're starting to see this trend where AI has definitely moved beyond being used for productivity, and more as the operating layer for enterprises, driving real enterprise-wide transformation, and that's because we're starting to see organizations really embed intelligence as part of everything.”
OpenAI has been on something of a roll when it comes to its enterprise offerings, unveiling a host of new launches and initiatives in recent weeks.
The company has seen huge initial success with its Codex coding tool, which Kramer says rose from three to four million weekly users in the space of just 15 days.
“I'm seeing a lot of uplift, whether it's technical or non-technical people leveraging Codex,” she says, highlighting how the tool isn’t just for developers or technicians, but can be useful for employees across a business.
In fact, she notes 40% of Codex usage now comes from non-technical workers across areas such as HR, finance, sales and marketing, who are using the platform for agentic delegation, removing workflows and the mundane admin work.
“It's allowing them to uplevel in their job,” Kramer says, “and focus on human relationships, strategic problem solving and creativity...it's a highly-embraced technology because of these reasons.”
And as for technical workers, they can benefit from the value Codex brings in helping with bottlenecks around testing and getting code into production, meaning such workers are becoming more like agent orchestrators, and getting software into production faster.
“We've moved beyond the vibe coding phase and using AI technology as just care programming,” Kramer says.
This also includes the launch of the OpenAI Deployment Company, which will allow it to widen its forward deployment initiatives, embedding staff within new customers to help them get to grips with OpenAI technology faster.
“It's really important that we have the support for our customers across their entire journey,” Kramer notes, highlighting how it has seen great success with deployments with the likes of Nvidia already.
At a wider level, Kramer agrees the increasing usage of AI technology in the workplace is at what OpenAI’s CRO Denise Dresser recently called “a tipping point”, governing more processes and workflows than ever before.
"That is what we're seeing, and that will start to become part of people's everyday lives, and work lives," Kramer says, noting how ChatGPT now has 900 million weekly active consumer users, a number which is surely set to grow in coming months, “so people clearly using it in their daily lives, and we've seen that beautifully transition into how they help make themselves better and more elevated in their professional lives.”
An OpenAI future
Summing up, I ask Kramer if she feels any pressure from heading up such big initiatives across one of the world’s most-scrutinized companies, and what success looks like to her.
“My barometer for success is always customers - are they successful, are they driving change?,” she says, “for me, it is making sure we see these organizations continue to move from pilot to production, solving major company and world issues together.”
“We see it as the biggest opportunity - our mission is AGI to benefit all of humanity - we're all here for that reason, and working with enterprises is a big part of that.”
“We all deeply understand the responsibility that we have to meet the mission that Sam (Altman) set many years ago.”
