OpenAI launches $4 billion Deployment Company to embed AI engineers inside enterprises

OpenAI creates new unit with $4 billion investment to aid corporate AI push

May 11 (Reuters) - OpenAI said on Monday it is setting up a new company with more than $4 billion in initial investment to help organizations build and deploy artificial intelligence systems, and will acquire an AI consulting firm, Tomoro, to quickly scale up the unit. After its early models saw strong resonance with consumers, OpenAI has been working aggressively to sign corporate contracts and establish a large presence in the business world where its AI will see large-scale deployment. The venture, ⁠which will be majority owned and controlled by OpenAI, also comes as rival Anthropic enjoys strong success in its enterprise AI push with its Claude family of models seeing rapid adoption among businesses. The new firm, called OpenAI Deployment Company, will help the ChatGPT maker embed engineers specializing in frontier AI deployment into organizations that will then work closely with various teams to identify where AI can make the biggest impact, OpenAI said. Its acquisition of Tomoro, a ⁠consulting firm that helps enterprises deploy AI, will bring around 150 experienced AI engineers and "deployment specialists" to the new unit from day one. Tomoro was formed in 2023 in alliance with OpenAI, and counts companies such as Mattel, Red Bull, Tesco and ⁠Virgin Atlantic as its clients, according to its website. Reuters reported last week that the joint ventures OpenAI and Anthropic separately created with private equity firms are ⁠in talks to acquire services companies that help businesses deploy artificial intelligence. OpenAI's deployment unit is a multi-year committed partnership between OpenAI and 19 firms, with ⁠the partnership led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, the ChatGPT maker said. Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru and Milana Vinn in New York; Editing by Leroy Leo Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenAI launches $4bn Deployment Company with TPG, Advent, Bain, and Brookfield

OpenAI has set up a new venture called OpenAI Deployment Company, with more than $4bn in initial funding from a syndicate of 19 firms led by TPG and including Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, the company said on Monday. The new entity, which will be majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI, has been formed to embed frontier-AI engineers inside enterprise customers and to oversee complex multi-team deployments of OpenAI's models. To staff it at speed, OpenAI is acquiring Tomoro, a London-based AI consulting firm formed in 2023 that already counts Mattel, Red Bull, Tesco, and Virgin Atlantic among its clients. The structure reads as part joint venture, part consulting acquisition, part response to Anthropic. OpenAI's products have sold strongly to consumers; ChatGPT is the most-used AI application in history. But enterprise contract conversion, the segment that pays the highest revenue per customer and that drives the multi-year commitments AI firms need to justify their capex profiles, has skewed toward Anthropic over the past twelve months. Eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers; Claude Code alone has run past $2.5bn in annualised revenue since launch. The OpenAI Deployment Company is the most concrete attempt yet to close that gap. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer, framed the move in his statement on the launch. "Our customers tell us they need help going from pilot to production. Deployment Company will put our engineers inside their teams, with the resources to ship." The framing acknowledges the practical reality of enterprise AI in 2026: model performance is no longer the bottleneck. Integration, change management, evaluation harnesses, security review, and the slow business-process redesign work that real adoption requires are the actual constraints. Anthropic has been investing heavily in that capability through its partner network and a series of vertical-deep acquisitions; OpenAI is now matching that with a different structure. TPG's lead role is interesting. The private-equity firm has been one of the largest investors in technology services in recent years, with positions in Cognizant Mantras, MEMSA and other large global consultancies. TPG's involvement, alongside Advent and Bain, is the kind of capital that builds out the operational scaffolding around a software company. Brookfield's participation adds an infrastructure investor whose portfolio increasingly includes AI-adjacent data-centre assets; the combination of these three with smaller participating firms gives Deployment Company a balance-sheet shape that lets it scale a large delivery organisation without OpenAI itself having to absorb the cost on its own income statement. The Tomoro acquisition price has not been disclosed. The firm, founded in 2023, was structured from inception as an OpenAI-aligned consultancy: it was effectively the unofficial deployment arm of OpenAI in Europe and the UK, and several of its founders had worked at OpenAI or with the company's commercial team. Bringing Tomoro inside the formal structure removes the partner-versus-employee ambiguity that had increasingly complicated large customer relationships. The named customer list (Mattel, Red Bull, Tesco, Virgin Atlantic) is itself useful disclosure, both as marketing and as evidence that the consulting motion has been generating revenue. Anthropic's 32% lead in the enterprise LLM API market is what OpenAI is now trying to reverse, and Tomoro is the first asset purchase in the campaign. The arithmetic behind the $4bn is worth examining. Deployment Company is not just an internal consulting unit; it has been set up with capital sufficient to fund its own R&D, hiring, and partner integrations, which suggests OpenAI expects the entity to operate at a meaningful operating loss in its early years. Industry analysts have estimated the eventual size of the unit at 2,000 to 4,000 deployment engineers within three years; that headcount, at fully-loaded compensation, supports a multi-billion-dollar annual run rate before any revenue from customer engagements is recognised. OpenAI's strategic premise is that the engagements those engineers produce will more than recoup the cost through enterprise contract conversions that would otherwise have gone to Anthropic or to internal customer engineering teams. That premise will be examined sceptically by some investors. Secondary-market scrutiny on OpenAI's $852bn valuation has been growing through 2026, with secondary-market price talk on OpenAI lots running below the primary mark. The Deployment Company structure is in part a response to that scrutiny: it converts what would otherwise be hard-to-evaluate "future enterprise revenue" into a tangible delivery asset whose progress can be measured in customer wins and bookings. The PE syndicate's diligence on the entity's economics is also a signal: TPG, Advent, Bain and Brookfield do not put four-billion-dollar cheques into structures that do not pencil at the unit-economics level. Anthropic's response is the more interesting near-term variable. The company has been building its enterprise capability through a different structure (a joint venture with the major Wall Street firms, a partner-network programme, and a marketplace for Claude-powered software). The two approaches reflect different theories of how enterprise AI gets delivered. OpenAI is closer to a Goldman-Sachs-style embedded-expert model. Anthropic's is closer to an SAP-style ecosystem-of-implementation-partners model. Both can work; both have different consequences for margin profile and customer lock-in. What the OpenAI announcement does, even without the Anthropic comparison, is normalise the idea that the major model labs will run their own large delivery organisations rather than depending on Accenture, Deloitte, IBM Consulting and Cognizant. That is a meaningful shift. Those four firms collectively employ hundreds of thousands of enterprise-IT consultants and have been the default delivery vehicles for every previous wave of enterprise software adoption. If the model labs build internal consulting at the scale OpenAI is now signalling, the traditional systems integrators will need to redefine their value proposition rapidly. Anthropic's $100m partner-network commitment, in this context, may have been an early adapter to the same shift rather than a defensive measure. There is also the question of what the Deployment Company actually delivers, beyond engineer hours. OpenAI's models are sufficiently powerful that the bottleneck for most enterprise customers is not whether the model can solve their problem in principle but whether the customer's data, processes, governance frameworks, and security regimes can be reorganised to let it. The new entity's value proposition is that it solves the reorganisation alongside the customer, with engineers who understand both the model and the integration. The risk is that the unit becomes a high-touch services firm whose economics resemble Accenture's rather than OpenAI's. Brad Lightcap's framing, focused on production-readiness rather than transformation, suggests OpenAI is aware of the risk. Tomoro's integration timeline has not been announced, although the deal closes in the second half of 2026. The London office will form the European hub of the new entity. Founder commentary so far has been brief; the announcement focused on the strategic logic rather than personnel changes. OpenAI's commitment to majority ownership and control means the existing Tomoro brand will likely fade into a Deployment Company within a year or two, although the leadership team is expected to stay through the transition.

OpenAI closes The Deployment Company, a $10bn enterprise AI bet on private equity

OpenAI has finalised the most structurally novel enterprise AI deal of 2026: a $10bn vehicle anchored by TPG, with 19 investors and a 17.5% guaranteed annual return over five years. The strategy is to make PE portfolios a captive distribution channel. We wrote about the venture's outline last month; Monday's confirmation closes the funding question. OpenAI confirmed that it has finalised The Deployment Company, a Delaware-domiciled joint venture intended to push its enterprise products into the operating businesses of some of the world's largest buyout firms. The vehicle is anchored by TPG and supported by Brookfield Asset Management, Advent International, Bain Capital, and Goanna Capital, with a total of 19 investors backing the entity. It is one of the more structurally novel arrangements yet attempted in enterprise AI distribution, and it tells you something about how OpenAI now sees the next phase of its commercial strategy. OpenAI's own commitment to the venture is up to $1.5bn: a $500m equity contribution at close, with an option to add a further $1bn at a later stage. The PE consortium is putting in roughly $4bn across the same five-year window. The entity is governed through super-voting shares retained by OpenAI, which keeps strategic control while the financial sponsors take the economics of an income-oriented investment. Yahoo Finance's confirmation, citing Reuters, made explicit what previous reporting had hinted at: OpenAI is guaranteeing the venture's PE backers a 17.5 per cent annual return over the five-year period. That guaranteed-return floor is, by any normal venture-investing standard, unusual. Private-equity vehicles do not typically receive an explicit annualised return commitment from an operating partner, and OpenAI does not typically write a structurally subordinated piece of paper. What the structure actually does is convert a piece of OpenAI's growth optionality into a tradeable, capped, fixed-yield instrument that PE firms can underwrite the way they would a credit fund. The PE firms, in return, agree to make their portfolio companies available as a captive enterprise customer base. The Deployment Company's mandate is to embed OpenAI's tools, both consumer-facing products and the underlying API and agentic capabilities, inside the operating layer of the consortium's portfolio. Healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and financial services have been mentioned in earlier filings as the priority sectors. Crucially, the venture will not just sell licences. It will, in the model OpenAI is now publicly comfortable describing, embed teams of OpenAI engineers directly inside client organisations, in a delivery pattern long associated with Palantir's forward-deployed-engineer approach. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is. We wrote about OpenAI's parallel "Frontier Alliances" with major consultancies, designed to push enterprise AI into production through professional-services channels. The Deployment Company is the same strategy translated from consultancy distribution into private-equity distribution, and it is, by some distance, the more aggressive of the two. DeployCo is not the only enterprise AI venture to land this week. Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs announced their own $1.5bn enterprise AI services firm, anchored at $300m apiece for the three principal investors. The two arrangements are, in many ways, mirror images. OpenAI's structure is bigger in absolute capital, more aggressively financialised, and more concentrated on PE's portfolio universe. Anthropic's is smaller, more anchor-investor-led, and more reliant on the prestige of its financial partners than on its capital scale. That divergence is itself the story. Both companies have decided that the conventional enterprise-software sales cycle, deal-by-deal, contract-by-contract, is too slow to capture the next wave of AI adoption. Both have decided that buyout firms, with their hundreds of operating companies and their structural ability to mandate adoption inside portfolios, are the most efficient distribution channel available. The companies have chosen meaningfully different ways to package that bet. There are a few. The first is regulatory: a guaranteed-return commitment from an AI-platform operator to the largest financial-services investors in the country sits inside a regulatory frame that has not been tested. Any read of the venture as a quasi-debt instrument, particularly one offering above-market yields backed by a fast-growing technology operator, will attract the attention of accounting and securities regulators eventually. OpenAI's super-voting governance reduces some of that risk, but does not eliminate it. The second is execution. PE firms are, in general, better at financial restructuring than at operational technology integration. The thesis behind The Deployment Company assumes that portfolio companies will not only adopt OpenAI's tools but will adopt them at a pace and depth that justifies the venture's economics. The track record of large-scale enterprise software rollouts inside PE portfolios is mixed. The third is strategic. By committing $1.5bn of its own capital and 17.5 per cent of guaranteed return for five years, OpenAI has, in effect, capped the upside of its enterprise PE channel. If The Deployment Company succeeds spectacularly, the financial sponsors capture more economics than a more traditional structure would have allowed. If it underperforms, OpenAI is on the hook for the floor. The closing of The Deployment Company, taken alongside OpenAI's existing $200m enterprise distribution partnership with Snowflake and the broader Frontier Alliances arrangement, makes one thing clear: OpenAI's commercial centre of gravity is shifting from product sales to embedded distribution. The model is no longer a chat product with an API attached. It is, increasingly, an operating layer being placed deliberately inside the world's largest businesses by partners who have agreed to share the costs and benefits of that placement. Whether $4bn of PE capital, $1.5bn of OpenAI capital, and a 17.5 per cent guaranteed return is the right way to structure that placement will be visible in revenue figures over the next 18 months.

OpenAI launches AI consulting arm valued at $14 billion

It's being called The OpenAI Deployment Co., or DeployCo for short. What we knew: DeployCo launches with $4 billion of investment at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, with OpenAI retaining majority control. It's not in today's announcement, but investors get a guaranteed minimum 17.5% return and have profits capped. * Goldman Sachs is the only backer of both DeployCo and a comparable effort from Anthropic. What we didn't know: Three blue-blood consultancies -- Bain & Co., Capgemini and McKinsey & Co. -- are among DeployCo's investors. * The generous interpretation is that the trio will gain a deeper understanding of OpenAI's capabilities and roadmap, which they can then share with clients. * The more cynical interpretation is that OpenAI somehow convinced these legacy firms to help fund their own disintermediation. Zoom in: TPG is DeployCo's lead investor, with Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield listed as "co-lead founding partners." * Other backers include B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, SoftBank, Warburg Pincus, and WCAS. * Axios previously noted that DeployCo may acquire forward-deployed engineering teams, and today's announcement mentioned that it's already bought one called Tomoro. What to watch: If other big PE firms like Carlyle, KKR and EQT come into the frontier lab fold, or if they decide there's more value in remaining unaffiliated.

OpenAI Just Launched a Consulting Arm to Help Companies Deploy AI - Decrypt

The announcement came just after Anthropic unveiled a similar $1.5 billion venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman. OpenAI has launched the OpenAI Deployment Company, a new majority-owned subsidiary designed to embed specialized engineers directly inside enterprises working on complex, high-stakes AI projects. The company enters with more than $4 billion in initial investment -- and a $10 billion valuation -- backed by 19 firms including TPG, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company. The model is borrowed directly from Palantir's playbook: Forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, parachute into client organizations and live inside the complexity -- legacy infrastructure, compliance constraints, convoluted permissions -- rather than shipping software and leaving the implementation headache to someone else. To staff the new entity from day one, OpenAI has agreed to acquire Tomoro, a U.K.-based applied AI consulting firm with deployments at Tesco, Virgin Atlantic, and Supercell, where its engineers built an in-game support agent serving 110 million users in 12 weeks. The acquisition brings roughly 150 engineers and deployment specialists. It is subject to regulatory approvals and expected to close in the coming months. Days before OpenAI's announcement, Anthropic revealed its own enterprise deployment venture -- a $1.5 billion entity backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs -- with essentially the same premise: embed engineers inside companies, redesign workflows around AI agents, build durable systems that don't evaporate after the pilot phase. The enterprise AI race is no longer primarily about benchmarks or model releases. It is about who owns the implementation layer, the deeply human work of getting AI into production inside organizations that weren't built for it. Enterprise already accounts for more than 40% of OpenAI's revenue, with the company reporting $25 billion in annualized revenue as of February, and enterprise on pace to reach parity with consumer revenue by end of 2026. For every dollar companies spend on software, they spend roughly six on services. That ratio has made consulting a multitrillion-dollar industry for decades. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are now positioning to capture that spend, not by partnering with McKinsey and similar consulting firms, but by becoming a version of it. OpenAI's investment partners collectively sponsor more than 2,000 businesses globally, giving the Deployment Company a built-in distribution channel that bypasses the traditional CIO sales cycle entirely. COO Brad Lightcap, who shifted to a special projects role in April, is overseeing the venture. Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who spent over a decade at Salesforce before running Slack, will lead commercial operations. OpenAI's enterprise market share has taken hits. Its API share reportedly dropped from around 50% in 2023 to roughly 25% by mid-2025, as Anthropic and Google made inroads. The Deployment Company is a structural response: Rather than competing on model benchmarks alone, OpenAI is building an implementation moat around its frontier models. The AI giant projects reaching $85 billion in revenue by 2030 -- a number that requires agents to become the default operating layer for enterprise, not just a productivity feature. The Deployment Company is its most direct bet yet that it can make that happen on its own terms, not just through APIs and subscriptions.

OpenAI Forms $4 Billion PE-Backed AI Deployment Venture

OpenAI is acquiring a consulting firm to support a new private equity-backed joint venture aimed at helping companies deploy artificial intelligence at scale. The venture, majority-owned and supported by more than $4 billion in capital, will launch alongside the acquisition of AI consultancy Tomoro, according to Reuters, as OpenAI expands its enterprise services and internal delivery capabilities. Tomoro's acquisition is expected to add roughly 150 AI engineers and "deployment specialists" at launch, giving the unit immediate capacity. Tomoro was created in 2023 in partnership with OpenAI, and its website lists clients including Mattel, Red Bull, Tesco, and Virgin Atlantic. The initiative is designed to accelerate adoption of AI within large organizations following strong early traction among consumer users. Operating under the name OpenAI Deployment Company, the new unit will embed specialized engineers directly within customer teams to identify and implement high-impact use cases alongside internal staff. The initiative arrives as competition for corporate AI budgets intensifies, with Anthropic's Claude models gaining ground with business customers, according to Reuters. OpenAI said the venture will be controlled by OpenAI even as it brings in outside capital. OpenAI described the deployment effort as a multi-year partnership involving 19 firms, with TPG leading and Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield serving as co-lead founding partners. Last week, it was revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic are both holding conversations to acquire services companies to help businesses deploy AI, the Wall Street Journal reported. Anthropic is working with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and several other Wall Street firms to sell AI tools to companies, while OpenAI is reportedly in talks with several firms regarding the same venture. Photo: Shutterstock This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

OpenAI Launches $4 Billion Company to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The new OpenAI Deployment Company is a partnership between OpenAI and 19 global investment firms, consultancies and system integrators, and is majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI, the firm said in a Monday (May 11) press release. It will work with businesses to help them identify where AI can make the biggest impact, redesign organizational infrastructure and critical workflows around AI, and turn gains into durable systems, according to the release. "AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organizations," OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said in the release. "The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses. DeployCo is designed to help organizations bridge that gap and turn AI capability into real operational impact." OpenAI also announced Monday that it plans to acquire applied AI consulting and engineering firm Tomoro, which will bring about 150 experienced forward deployed engineers and deployment specialists to OpenAI Deployment Company. The acquisition is expected to close within months, subject to customary closing conditions, per the release. "As part of the OpenAI Deployment Company after closing, the team will strengthen OpenAI's ability to help customers move from use case selection to production deployment faster," OpenAI said in the release. The company also said in the release that OpenAI Deployment Company plans to acquire other firms that can help it deploy AI, using the $4 billion initial investment with which the company launched. In its own announcement of the planned acquisition, Tomoro said the company was formed two-and-a-half years ago to use AI to redefine how work gets done and that as part of OpenAI Deployment Company, it will be able to do so on a larger scale. "Generating maximum value from OpenAI's suite of products and models, we'll help organizations move from use case selection to AI systems that are live in both day-to-day work and customer experiences," Tomoro said in its announcement. It was reported Thursday (May 7) that OpenAI's new joint venture with private equity investors was in advanced talks on three acquisitions of services companies that help businesses deploy AI. OpenAI and rival enterprise AI company Anthropic are looking to bring in hundreds of engineers and consultants who can help companies connect AI models to their data, workflows and internal systems. It was reported May 4 that OpenAI had raised $4 billion for its effort to get businesses to adopt its AI tools and that its new venture was valued at $10 billion.

OpenAI Venture in Talks to Buy AI Services Firms | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The ChatGPT maker's new joint venture with private equity investors is in advanced talks on three acquisitions of services companies that help businesses deploy AI, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Anthropic, OpenAI's chief rival in enterprise AI, is pursuing a similar path through its own private equity-backed venture, Reuters said. Both companies declined to comment to Reuters. The goal is straightforward: acquire engineering and consulting capacity at scale. Reuters said OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to bring in hundreds of engineers and consultants who can help companies connect AI models to their data, workflows and internal systems. OpenAI is raising roughly $4 billion from 19 investors, including TPG, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management, for a vehicle called The Deployment Company, according to the report. Anthropic is raising $1.5 billion from investors including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, The Wall Street Journal reported, as cited by Reuters. The deals would widen the AI race beyond bigger models and cheaper computing. For banks, payment firms and retailers, the hard part is often not getting access to AI. It is making the technology useful in daily operations without breaking compliance, security or customer experience standards. That requires people who understand both the technology and the business process it is meant to improve. Reuters framed the move as a sign of a growing tension in enterprise AI. The industry is often described as a high-margin software market, but real adoption still depends on skilled, hands-on services. Companies need help tailoring models to their own data, systems and workflows, and then adjusting those tools as business needs change. Reuters quoted Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray as saying the push could "break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption." The model also echoes Palantir's approach of embedding engineers inside customer operations, Reuters noted, and could lead to consolidation among smaller consulting and IT services firms. PYMNTS has been tracking OpenAI's push deeper into enterprise, finance and commerce. Recent coverage includes its reported $4 billion raise for The Deployment Company, its partnership with PwC for finance teams, Customers Bank's plan to use OpenAI across commercial banking operations, and OpenAI's shift toward brand-owned ChatGPT apps instead of direct checkout inside ChatGPT.

OpenAI Raises $4 Billion to Help Enterprises Deploy AI | PYMNTS.com

That's according to a report Monday (May 4) from Bloomberg News, citing a source familiar with the matter. This source says that the venture, known as The Deployment Company, is backed by several investment firms, with the deal valuing the company at $10 billion. The source added that partners for OpenAI's new joint venture will get access to more than 2,000 portfolio companies and clients. PYMNTS has contacted OpenAI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. The news follows previous reports that OpenAI was at work on a project to increase enterprise adoption of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It also came the same day that rival AI startup Anthropic announced a similar venture, teaming with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and several other Wall Street firms to help companies embed Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence (AI) model into their businesses. "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Krishna Rao, Anthropic's finance chief, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. "Our partnerships with the world's leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises. This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers." As Bloomberg notes, the two companies have been rushing to get more businesses to pay for their AI software as they prepare to go public, something that could happen as soon as this year. OpenAI recently moved Brad Lightcap, its operations chief, into a new role handling special projects, including its effort to land enterprise customers, Bloomberg added. Recent weeks have also seen reports of conflict within OpenAI between CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar about the timing on the initial public offering (IPO), as well as word that the company had missed key internal targets. OpenAI has denied these claims. PYMNTS wrote recently about the way enterprises are rethinking their AI spending as companies shift their pricing practices. "AI tools that embedded themselves inside engineering workflows as productivity aids are now line items with variable, consumption-driven costs," that report said. "Enterprises that adopted them at scale without modeling actual usage are finding invoices that don't match budgets." Organizational readiness is still the most cited barrier to AI adoption at bigger companies. A little more than 71% of executives at companies with at least $1 billion in yearly revenue named it as the chief limit on AI performance, according to research by PYMNTS Intelligence. Just 11% said the technology itself is the main obstacle.

OpenAI establishes new entity to accelerate enterprise AI adoption

This initiative marks a new milestone in OpenAI's strategy as it seeks to strengthen its enterprise market presence following the consumer success of ChatGPT. Facing intensifying competition from rivals such as Anthropic and its Claude models, OpenAI aims to accelerate the signing of large-scale contracts with major corporations. The new entity's mission will notably include embedding specialized AI engineers directly within client companies to identify the most effective use cases for these technologies. The acquisition of Tomoro will bring approximately 150 engineers and AI deployment specialists to the new structure. Founded in 2023 in partnership with OpenAI, the firm already works with groups such as Mattel, Red Bull, Tesco and Virgin Atlantic. The project is further supported by a multi-year partnership involving 19 financial and industrial firms, led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield among the primary founding partners.