OpenAI Marks 1 Million Business Customer Milestone

OpenAI said it now has more than 1 million business customers around the world.

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup announced this milestone Wednesday (Nov. 5), saying it makes OpenAI “the fastest-growing business platform in history.”

The figure, the company said on its blog, “includes all organizations that actively pay OpenAI for business use—either through ChatGPT for Work, or through direct consumption of our models through our developer platform.”

“Our enterprise momentum is fueled in part by consumer adoption,” the post added.“With more than 800 million weekly users already familiar with ChatGPT, adoption and ROI within businesses is realized more rapidly—pilots are shorter and rollouts face less friction.”

The blog post also cited a recent Wharton study⁠ which found that 75% of enterprises saw a positive ROI, and under 5% report a negative return.

“While there are many studies on this topic, this one reflects what we see on the ground today with our customers: when AI is deployed with the right use case and infrastructure, teams see real results,” the company said.

Writing about AI use in business in September, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster referred to PYMNTS Intelligence research showing “a strong, or what I might even call compelling,” positive impact from generative AI in the corporate world.

According to those findings, 90% of enterprise chiefs cited a positive effect on their customer experience, and more than three quarters saw a positive impact on their competitive position.

Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a recent episode of the BG2Pod podcast that the company was doing “well more” than $13 billion in revenue.

That figure has been widely shared, leading some observers to wonder how the company could pay for its recent compute deals with $13 billion in revenue.

“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that,” Altman said on the podcast, adding that the company’s revenue is growing steeply, per a report on the broadcast by Seeking Alpha.

When one of the podcast’s hosts asked if OpenAI could hit $100 billion in revenue in 2028 or 2029, Altman replied: “How about ’27?”

Also this week, OpenAI and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a $38 billion agreement that lets OpenAI run its AI workloads on AWS infrastructure, beginning immediately.

Under the agreement, OpenAI will access AWS compute comprising hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and can expand to tens of millions of CPUs to scale agentic workloads.

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