It’s fair to say that perhaps no other company (except Nvidia) has helped shape the AI tools revolution as much as OpenAI.
The company is still (at the time of writing) only three years old, but thanks to the success of ChatGPT, has become a household name across the name, synonymous with AI platforms for many everyday users.
But how does OpenAI now take this widespread adoption and awareness and spread it among enterprises, where the true investment really lies? I spoke to Matt Weaver, Head of Solutions Engineering, EMEA at OpenAI, to find out more.
Enterprise focus
I’m speaking to Weaver shortly after its recent OpenAI Dev Day, the company’s latest flagship event, where it revealed a host of new announcements designed to help developers get to grips with its services.
“Our goal is simple,” he declares, “it’s to make it possible for anyone from a developer perspective that’s got an idea and a few lines of code, to build the next great company on our platform…and we’re trying to give them all the tools to do that.”
That includes the new AgentKit and AgentBuilder platforms – tools which should make it easier for developers working with OpenAI’s APIs to build agents, combined with improved UI components.
There’s also Codex, an agentic coding model which can now be used by developers wherever they work, whether that be in the terminal, in IDEs, or in the cloud, along with a Slack plugin that allows developers to chat with Codex within the online collaboration tool, and a Codex SDK to enable the productionization of Codex into shipping of code.
Finally, Apps in ChatGPT will let enterprises develop a UI or UX for businesses to go inside ChatGPT itself, presenting what Weaver calls, “a whole new opportunity for businesses…meeting the users where they are.”
“What we see when we work with enterprises – and it breaks my heart sometimes,” Weaver says, “is that we’ll go into five different companies, and they’re all building the same scaffolding for their applications to work, rather than spending time working on the thing that will really differentiate for their business.”
“The launches we put out there, from start-ups all the way to global enterprises, we’re really trying to make OpenAI the best place for builders to actually come and build their applications using GenAI.”
“Tops down, bottoms up”
In slight contrast to many other blockbuster technology platforms of the past few years, ChatGPT became popular among consumers and enthusiasts before seeing widespread business adoption – and this is something Weaver says is helping boost awareness and appetite in enterprises.
“Most people are using ChatGPT in their personal lives, and they’re showing up at work expecting the same access to the same level of intelligence, the same ease of use.” Weaver says, noting there are over five million paying business users as it stands.
“It can be tempting to have a big, ambitious, transformational project that totally transforms the way your business works – but if you don’t pair that with building AI literacy among your employees, then you could often fail,” he says, outlining the company’s “tops down, bottoms up” view – blending big bets with widespread employee adoption of AI tools.
Weaver adds that often when the company is deploying ChatGPT enterprise across a large organization, it will have hackathons which often, “find incredibly valuable use cases for AI deployment that senior management has never thought of.”
On a lighter note, Weaver also notes he uses a transcription record mode tool for meeting summarizations, and a voice dictation tool to sum up the key events of his working day – and that he’s also using the ChatGPT Agent and Deep Research to help plan his own wedding.
Mission-aligned
Concluding our call, I ask Weaver how he and his team manage to stay focused and aligned, given the seemingly incredible pace of development at OpenAI.
“OpenAI is a very mission-aligned company, you feel that when you’re here – and the mission is to build AGI for the benefit of everyone, so when you’re making big decisions…it’s with that in mind,” he says.
“I think the main thing is to not to get distracted by a lot of the noise that’s happening on the outside – lots of people have lots to say about what they think OpenAI is doing, and actually inside, it’s remarkable how calm and focused the atmosphere is, because we have a mission, we know what it is, we know what it’s going to take to get to the next step – and we can’t forget that over 800 million people rely on us every single week.”
