OpenAI’s not-so-secret weapon in winning business customers? ChatGPT

livemint.com:

OpenAI is aiming to use its popular chatbot ChatGPT—it said 600,000 individuals pay for business versions of it—as a way to gain an entry into businesses and sell them its enterprise artificial-intelligence services. Those individuals are paying for ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Team, which make up what OpenAI calls its “business products," according to OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap.

ChatGPT Enterprise is aimed at large companies with over 100 employees, and ChatGPT Team is geared at smaller firms with less than 100 employees, the company said. OpenAI said it doesn’t disclose the number of businesses that pay for its services.

It said 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using ChatGPT in some form, and 100 million people actively use ChatGPT on a weekly basis. “We want to go maximize the number of companies that have a ChatGPT license, but if people are not actually using the technology underneath, then who cares? It’s shelfware," Lightcap said in an interview.

“As we build better products, we just want to see that number [of individual users] go up." The San Francisco-based AI company, which has been at the center of the current boom in generative AI, is up against many well-funded competitors in pursuing business customers, including tech giant Microsoft, its primary backer and partner. Unlike innovations in previous tech booms, generative AI is ideally suited for transforming the way businesses operate—and a growing number of firms are looking to cash in on it.

Owing much to its relationship with Microsoft, OpenAI has become one of the de facto vendors companies initially use to test generative AI, many chief information officers say. But increasingly, open-source models from companies such as Meta