Aiming to catch up with rivals in 2026, OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership team and selected familiar faces to lead the company in driving AI sales to enterprise customers.
The Information reports, citing an internal OpenAI memo, that the company has appointed Barrett Zoff to lead its efforts to sell AI to enterprises.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information.
Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, the AI startup of former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, where he had been co-founder and CTO since October 2024.
The exact circumstances of his departure are unclear, but rumors are swirling that Zoph and several other former OpenAI employees were either fired, left voluntarily, or perhaps had plans to return to OpenAI all along.
Zoph was VP of Post-Training Inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He will take on a completely different position and will play a key role in the company’s efforts to grow its enterprise business, which is losing ground to competitors.
OpenAI released its ChatGPT Enterprise product for enterprises in 2023, more than a year before Anthropic and several years before Google launched its enterprise offering. The company says its product has more than 5 million business users and includes companies like SoftBank, Target, and Lowe’s as customers.
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However, the company’s market share is declining while its competitors are rising.
Anthropic holds a commanding lead over its AI rivals when it comes to using language models at scale in the enterprise. According to a December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures, AI Institute has a 40% market share (notably, the company is an active investor in Anthropic). As of July, the startup’s market share was estimated at 32%.
According to Menlo Ventures, Google’s Gemini adoption is progressing steadily. Although the company released its enterprise product last fall, Menlo’s research shows that market share for enterprise LLM use has remained largely flat, rising from 20% in July to 21% at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s usage market share has fallen from 50% in 2023 to 27% by the end of 2025, a trend that seems to worry the company. In an internal memo a few months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed particular concern that Google Gemini’s growth was starting to erode OpenAI.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in a blog post last Sunday that enterprise growth will be a focus area for the company in 2026.
The company then announced an expanded multi-year partnership with ServiceNow that will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.
