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OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has hosted lots of of Fortune 500 company executives in San Francisco, Latest York and London this month where he and other OpenAI executives pitched AI services for corporate use, going head to head in some cases with financial backer Microsoft, attendees told Reuters.
The roadshow-like events illustrate how the corporate credited with sparking the explosion of generative artificial intelligence with its consumer offering, is looking to grow recent sources of revenue from corporates everywhere in the world — some of it potentially on the house turf of its biggest partner.
The three meetings with senior corporate executives — two within the U.S. last week and one in London on Monday — haven’t been reported previously.
Altman directly addressed greater than 100 executives in each city on the events, according to attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
At each event, Altman and chief operating officer Brad Lightcap offered product demonstrations, including ChatGPT Enterprise, the enterprise grade of its famous chatbot that generates text from easy prompts, software to connect customer applications to its AI services often known as APIs, and its recent text-to-video models.
OpenAI has promised that ChatGPT Enterprise customers’ data is not going to be used to train its models. Talking to potential customers from industries including finance, healthcare and energy, OpenAI executives highlighted a variety of applications, resembling call-center management and translation. They noted the buyer version of its chatbot is already in use by greater than 92% of Fortune 500 firms.
Microsoft, the most important investor in OpenAI, offers access to OpenAI’s technology through its Azure cloud and by selling Microsoft 365 Copilot, a productivity tool powered by OpenAI’s models targeting enterprises.
Some executives within the audience on the events asked why they need to pay for ChatGPT Enterprise in the event that they are already customers of Microsoft, attendees said.
Altman and Lightcap responded that paying for the enterprise service allowed them to work with the OpenAI team directly, have access to the most recent models and more opportunity to get customized AI products, according to attendees present.
OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment.
OpenAI, last valued at $86 billion in a secondary sale, has been trying to diversify its revenue stream since its chatbot ChatGPT quickly gained popularity in late 2022. It’s on course to achieve the $1 billion revenue goal it projected for 2024, sources have said.
While trying to construct out recent products of consumers resembling the marketplace ChatGPT stores, the corporate expects selling to enterprises to turn out to be a more meaningful a part of its revenue. Lightcap told Bloomberg last week greater than 600,000 people signed up to use ChatGPT Enterprise and Team, up from around 150,000 in January.
Lightcap, the essential OpenAI executive focused on enterprise adoption, has also frolicked in Hollywood talking to studio executives to promote the corporate’s Sora video creation tool. That technology, which might create and refine videos based on a user’s text description, has caused each excitement and anxiety throughout the creative industry.
Two major Hollywood studios told Reuters they’re searching for early access to begin exploring applications, though there are some concerns in regards to the source of the video used to train Sora, the reliability of the output and its ability to protect copyrighted works.
Fox and News Corp also hosted Altman at a leadership retreat last October, where he took part in a question-and-answer session, according to one source with knowledge of the session.