Dennis Dresser, chief revenue officer at OpenAI, said Monday that the adoption of artificial intelligence in the enterprise has reached a “tipping point” and the startup’s new implementation company will help encourage more companies to participate.
“Think about complex workflows, how you actually build product services, product markets, products. This structure of this company allows us to do that quickly and at scale,” Dresser said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
OpenAI announced new business units on Monday, including the acquisition of applied AI consulting firm Tomor. OpenAI Development Company is a partnership with 19 investment and consulting firms, including Bain, Goldman Sachs, and SoftBank, and is majority owned and managed by OpenAI.
The acquisition of Tomoro will bring approximately 150 engineers specializing in deploying frontier AI models under OpenAI’s umbrella to work with customers. These forward-facing engineers will help enterprises with their AI adoption.
“Forward-deployed engineers can help you sit with the organization, sit with the users, understand the workflow, take that functionality out of your back-office applications, connect it to your models, and actually build intelligence around each workflow,” Dresser told CNBC.
Dresser’s comments come as competition for enterprise customers intensifies, with OpenAI’s rival Anthropic a leader and Google also a player in the same space as Gemini.
Anthropic announced last week that it is partnering with Goldman Sachs and Blackstone to launch a $1.5 billion company aimed at accelerating AI adoption across hundreds of companies.
Dresser, who previously served as Slack’s CEO, was hired as OpenAI’s chief revenue officer in December.
Dresser revealed in an April blog post that the enterprise division currently accounts for more than 40% of OpenAI’s revenue, adding that the company expects that part of the business to reach parity with the consumer division by the end of 2026.
Dresser sent a memo to staff last month touting OpenAI’s recent partnership with Amazon Web Services through cloud platform Bedrock and putting some distance between the startup and longtime partner Microsoft.
“Our partnership with Microsoft has been the foundation of our success, but it has also limited our ability to meet companies where they are, and for many, that is Bedrock,” Dresser wrote in a memo seen by CNBC. “Since we announced our partnership at the end of February, the inbound demand from our customers for this service has been frankly incredible.”
CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
