It's a watershed year for the world’s most valuable AI company. It’s rapidly restructuring for revenue, aggressively competing for top AI talent, and fending off competition in its native U.S. and abroad. As the maker of ChatGPT pivots toward a more commercial future, can it maintain its momentum and justify its $300 billion valuation?

Ashley Kramer
Chief Revenue Officer, OpenAI

Andrew Nusca
Editorial Director, Fortune Brainstorm

How OpenAI is Closing Deals

Conferences

I'm excited to introduce now the morning session, the first opening session. This person is leading charge of revenue. At the most valuable AI company in the world, she has a lot to live up to. What was once a research lab now has a reported valuation up to $500 billion. Please welcome the chief revenue officer of OpenAI, Ashley Kramer. She'll be joined by Fortune AI reporter Sharon Goldman. Hello. Hi, Ashley. Hello. I feel like this is my understudy moment. Thanks for standing in fantastic. This is great. So glad you could join us. This is terrific. Good morning, everyone. Um, well, OpenAI was famously founded in 2015 as a research lab, but today you are scaling one of the fastest growing businesses in the world. As its first chief revenue officer, I wanted to write off the bat, ask you how you balance this urgency of revenue growth with those research routes that OpenAI is known for. Yeah, I mean, I think I'd say first and foremost we are a research lab. We're a research. lab that has breakthrough technologies and findings that we turn into real world products that can drive further innovation and so that's what was most exciting for me about joining this company by way of background, I am not a salesperson by nature. I was a software engineer. I've been a chief product officer at my former company Gitlab. I was even a chief technology officer, and throughout my entire career it was all about how We partner with organizations, companies, consumers across the world to really drive change, and that stays first and foremost for us. Our mission remains the same AGI to benefit all of humanity and that's what excites me to be here and part of this mission every day. Absolutely. Well, OpenAI just hit 1 billion in monthly revenue, I think it was in July, which is extraordinary by any measure. At the same time, reports suggest. that the company is also burning cash at an unprecedented pace. From your C to CRO, I'm wondering how you keep driving customer adoption while also, you know, showing investors this is a sustainable business again, kind of like balancing those two things. Yes, it's all about, you know, measuring the usage of what we're creating and making sure that it is driving value. And so the balance is real when we think about it, particularly from the finance level. It's all about making. Making sure we have the capital to make sure we have the capacity for all of these frontier models and making sure that we're delivering the capabilities to organizations, consumers, customers across the world. And so the balance is real, but what energizes me, particularly on the enterprise revenue side, is really the way that these companies are thinking about not just transforming their business but transforming the world together with us and with other partners. Right, the enterprise market, you know, that's something that everyone's going for. You also see enterprise's expectations kind of rising, you know, we're now almost 3 years since Chat GPT came out. These are no longer enterprises that are brand new to using these tools. How have you seen their expectations change and demands for what OpenAI has to offer? So we see a balance. We see the forward thinkers that have been partnering with us for years and you know. Deeply with us as far as research, particularly in healthcare, financial services, retail, so we see those ones really on the bleeding edge. Now we see ones that have a little bit of FOMO around it and are in catch up mode. And so our balance is continuing to partner with those companies, with those customers in understanding what we can do together to drive change, but also figuring out how to make that repeatable across industries, across departments, within organizations, across the customer. right, not just pilots, but the whole idea is to scale it out, right? Real production use cases measuring real ROI, which by the way, is not the easiest thing. We've talked a lot about that here at ROI you have how do you measure the ROI number one question that I get, but it is, it is something that we continue to focus on and we partner with customers on. In the end there are even within organizations sometimes conflicting priorities. I'll give you a real life story. I met. The chief AI officer at a large hospital system and I said to her, How are you going? She was new and I said, How are you going to measure ROI of this joint AI investment that we make together? And she said, I'm going to measure it by better patient safety, faster time to serve patients, and better patient satisfaction. I said, Great, we can do that together. And she said, but my CFO is going to measure dollar ROI. Even within that organization, sometimes conflicting, right? Well, we, we, as I say, we've talked a lot here already at Brainstorm Tech about ROI. Yet, as you said, OpenAI is known for pushing the technology frontier towards AGI, AGI with the mission of benefiting humanity, artificial general intelligence. As chief revenue officer, how do you balance the customer's demand for this practical immediate value? One thing I was thinking, this is kind of silly. But I remember speaking to folks at OpenAI, and they talked about their salespeople being like AGI Sherpas, you know, bringing their organizations toward AGI. Do you see that in the same way today? This was like 2 years ago. Has that shifted? I think, I think it's still going on that, on that pace. When AI and Gen AI was first introduced, it was all about people saving time, being more productive, teams working better together, tasks that used to take a month, then take. We then take a day, then take an hour. Now we're seeing they really want to figure out how to transform. And so I have, I take no credit because I hired hardly any of them. I'm fairly new to the company, world class sales leaders, world class salespeople that really want to integrate with the businesses and understand how to solve these challenges together, a partnership, not a vendorship, because that's the only way that we will drive change together, right? Um, Just turning a little bit to other aspects of the OpenAI business, thinking about the $6.5 billion acquisition of Joni Ives IO positioning OpenAI in the hardware race, which I think is not immediately where people put their thoughts about OpenAI, but they're really going into a lot of different areas. So how do you see that as CRO? Does this mean that OpenAI sees its future, you know, not just as the software powerhouse, but as an integrated hardware? A, how does that shift the whole commercial story to you as far as revenue going forward? I think time will tell on that. I mean, at first what we're focused on is really figuring out how to, you know, inspire, engage, enable with more people. If you think about the trajectory of where even computers have come, it started with command line, then it moved to graphical user interfaces, interacting via mouse, then touch. Now it's time for more of an ambient solution. And I know as much as you do on exactly what that will be. So if that's the next question, I do not know the next question. I'm not asking for your prediction on what hardware, but for us it's about, you know, AI more accessible to everyone in a way that that the world is moving. And so we are super excited to have more possibilities on what we can do on top of these frontier models that we've been creating since 2015. Absolutely, I want to make sure that I let you guys know that that we're open for questions up here and I'll let you guys think about that a little bit, um, but definitely put your thoughts in motion and I'll come back to you guys. um, but you, you, you've said that one of your goals is to ensure OpenAI is seen as a trusted partner to enterprises, you know, not just a vendor but really partnering with these organizations, some of which are very large, um, but amid lawsuits. You know, we've got regulatory scrutiny. There's intense debates about AI's risks. How do you protect the brand, you know, while scaling aggressively? I feel like this is something that OpenAI has, you know, been wrestling with all along, and here you are having to like take that forward. How does that work for you? Yeah, and it's the number one question I answer in enterprise is will you use my data to train your models? The answer is no. Trust. The safety security always top of mind. A real example is we launched our first open source open weight model a little over a month ago, and it was launched late because it wasn't ready. Sam publicly tweeted that we wanted to put more safety testing and guardrails around it before we launched it. So for us it's less about time to market to get there first and more about is it the most trusted privacy first model. Solution out there and it is definitely a conversation I have with enterprises, but we have some of the largest healthcare financial services companies working with us and so we couldn't do that if we didn't have that top of mind. I'm curious, is there an example you can give up a client that you worked with where like you, I don't know how to change the timeline or really wanted to make sure that things were, you know, set and in order before releasing something for them. You know, to make sure that everything was as safe and trustworthy as possible. Yeah, particularly for the ones that we deeply partner with because we are getting glimpses of their data just within their walls. We're doing e-valves together. We're building together and so we less so have hard dates as milestones and more outcome-based milestones and So as long as we are aligned on that and we wouldn't go into the partnership unless we were, that's more of how the team thinks about going to market with customers versus on August 1, 2026 this must launch. It is when we are ready for this outcome and we feel all of these safety checks have passed and we're ready to go, we will launch together. Any questions for Ashley so far? We've got some mic runners here. OK. I hope you've had your coffee, people. Oh, I think we've got one over here. Hi, good morning. Um, thank you for being here. What's your name and where are you from? Danilo Tomanovic, Synchronicity Angel Ventures. I know you just joined the OpenAI team, but I think a real crucible moment was November of 22 when we had Dev Day. And one of the things I was paying attention to was that initial group of enterprise companies that were there. So I'm wondering if you could provide a little bit of visibility, for instance, in Shopify as being one. I'm from Toronto, so this is, this is, yeah, it is near and dear. I love Toby. Toby is a gift as a CEO. He's remarkable. He's developed an incredible culture there and Uh, the entire team deserves all the success as you do, but I'm wondering if you could, that's something that's missing for me when I'm reading the press is could you give us some visibility in terms of the people that had started with you in November of 22 and then perhaps some insight as far as what they've learned along the way, because a lot has changed in terms of technology and adoption and we can talk about the metrics, but I'm more concerned about that initial group and where are they? Today we continue to grow with even our earliest customers and partners, and what we've done is learned along the way. So November 2022 was our first launch of Chat GPT. We launched Chat GBT because we needed more ways to make our deep models that we had been developing accessible to more people. So if you're a large organization that has a deep developer team, you could use API platform, but what about people that didn't have that? And so we go on this journey with customers like Shopify figuring out if it's going to build joint solutions together, leveraging the model directly, whether it's going to empower. We're doing a lot of what we call wall to wall chat GPT deployments, making it the digital operating system of the company, and then there's more. can do along the lines of commerce partnerships, inviting more of the startup ecosystem in, more of the retailers in to have that one consistent experience. And so we're super grateful for the early enterprises because we continue to partner closely on what we can do next together. So again we can achieve that overall mission together of AGI to benefit all of humanity. Beyonce, oh, sorry, we've got one more here. Let's take one more. Thank you. Let us know who you are and who you're with. Hi, my name is Gillian Mannis. I'm with the European Innovation Council. We're a deep tech fund for the European Commission. So I'm just wondering with the regulatory, you know, landscape being so fluid and obviously the AI Act in Europe and other countries trying to figure this all out. Is OpenAI or will open AI influence or try to inform the global geopolitical landscape in order to help us all use AI in a much more constructive, intentional, and mutually beneficial way. Absolutely, and we have a large global affairs team that is focused purely on that. I'll be in Europe next week meeting with some of them. And so for us this is a global effort, and we realize just like when data started moving to the cloud and there were different rules and regulations depending on what country you're in, what region you're in. Um, but we, we do want to keep trust, privacy, safety, security top of mind, and that means trying to have influence to make sure that it is a global effort and we're, and we're complying with regulation and compliance to the needs of the specific regions. So absolutely. I just want to, speaking of Europe, um, globally, uh, you know, OpenAI's competition has kind of really risen up, especially over the past year and a half or so. When Chachi PT first came out, a lot of other players were playing catch up, but now rivals in Europe, the US, China are moving fast. How do you think about maintaining OpenAI's positioning and proving that the valuation is justified? especially when you're working with these larger companies who might have different choices as far as which company they want to go with. Yeah, for us it's all about prioritizing where we can jointly with enterprises find the most value. So you see a lot of different players in the space doing things like popping different flavors of a chat up for free. You see. Is doing big marketing efforts around industry efforts for us, we want the value to be provided by what we're actually driving, whether it's for the customer or the customer's customers. So for us it's all about the usage and the value and prioritizing that. And again, when you focus even from an industry perspective, things become repeatable and you understand how you can go from one bank to the other and help them. And then build on top of that. And so we're more focused on making sure we're research led first to build those products versus in the enterprise the big marketing buzz to try to just capture a wider audience. We're doing it very thoughtfully. I've spoken to folks at OpenAI about kind of beyondchat GPT, these bespoke deployments tailored to specific industries. You know, how do you see the future of those industry specific models? Is there going to be, is that really the future? Do you think when it comes to enterprise, the more bespoke and customized the better? Do you see that really outpacing the consumer subscriptions as the main revenue driver for OpenAI? I think it'll be a balance of both. We have both today, but when we We partner and we can leverage the data specific to a healthcare organization or financial services. We can go deeper with them when we have forward deployed engineers involved with their teams to build those solutions, we can move faster and drive deeper solutions. And so I believe it will be a mix of both. I just found out. This stat actually a few weeks ago that 90% of the world's data is not being analyzed right now. It's either locked up in unstructured places. It's in PDFs, it's in emails, or it's deeply locked within an organization that has compliance around it. So if we can help even get a glimpse of that, we can build much more powerful solutions together. And, I've got time for one more question here. This is your moment, OK, right here. I, I don't know if it's my moment. Thank you for coming. My name is Sati Muha Krishnan. I run technology at Allied Financial, the largest digital bank in the US. We were one of the early adopters of OpenAI. We still continue to run on OpenAI. Um, she asked a question about regulations, and I want to connect it to what you just said. So, are you open to partnering and creating, uh, not an LLM but an SLM? small language model that is specific to banks that will satisfy the regulators and, and give us the opportunity to unleash innovation at a much faster rate than we do now. It's absolutely something customers request and they want them air gaps within their walls. This is, this is one of the many reasons for our open source model being leverage. Because you can actually take that model and specifically put it within the walls of your organization, financial services, particularly government, we're asking for that. And so that is one of the many paths that I absolutely see emerging in the future, and we're happy to partner with customers on what that means. And thank you for being a customer. Well, we are out of time, so sad. Thank you so much, Ashley. Everyone give it up for Ashley Kramer from OpenAI. Thank you so much.