Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it now has 3 million paying business users, up from the 2 million it reported in February.
The San Francisco-based startup rocketed into the mainstream in late 2022 with its consumer-facing artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, and began launching workplace-specific versions of the product the following year.
The 3 million users include ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Edu customers, OpenAI said.
“There’s this really tight interconnect between the growth of ChatGPT as a consumer tool and its adoption in the enterprise and in businesses,” OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC in an interview. The company supported 400 million weekly active users as of February.
OpenAI expects revenue of $12.7 billion this year, a source confirmed to CNBC. In September of last year, the company expected to see an annual loss of $5 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be named because the financials are confidential.
Lightcap said OpenAI is seeing its business tools adopted across industries, including highly regulated sectors like financial services and health care. Companies including Lowe’s, Morgan Stanley and Uber are users, OpenAI said.
The company also announced new updates to its business offerings on Wednesday.
ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Enterprise users can now access “connectors,” which will allow workers to pull data from third-party tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Box and OneDrive without leaving ChatGPT. Additional deep research connectors are available in beta.
OpenAI launched another capability called “record mode” in ChatGPT, which allows users to record and transcribe their meetings. It’s initially available with audio only.
Record mode can assist with follow up after a meeting and integrates with internal information like documents and files, the company said. Users can also turn their recordings into documents through the company’s Canvas tool.
Lightcap said enterprise customers have been asking for updates like these, and that they will help make OpenAI’s workplace offerings more useful.
“It’s got to be able to do tasks for you, and to do that, it’s got to really have knowledge of everything going on around you and your work,” Lightcap said. “It can’t be the intern locked in a closet. It’s got to be able to see what you see.”
OpenAI said it has been signing up nine enterprises a week, and Lightcap said the company will try to sustain that pace over time.
“People are starting to really figure out that this is a part of the modern tool stack in the knowledge economy that we live in,” he said.
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