OpenAI boasts business profit days after internal ‘code red’ on Google threat | TechCrunch

OpenAI released new data on Monday showing that enterprise use of its AI tools has increased dramatically over the past year, with ChatGPT message volume increasing eightfold since November 2024 and employees reporting savings of up to an hour every day. The findings come a week after CEO Sam Altman sent an internal message “code red” memo about Google’s competitive threat.

The timing underlines OpenAI’s commitment to redefine its position as a leader in business AI, even as the company faces increasing pressure. While nearly 36% of U.S. businesses are ChatGPT Enterprise customers, compared to 14.3% for Anthropic, per Disaster AI Indexthe majority of OpenAI’s revenue still comes from consumer subscriptions – a base threatened by Google’s Gemini. OpenAI also has to compete with rival AI company Anthropic – whose revenue comes mainly from B2B sales – and, increasingly, providers of open-weight models for business customers.

The AI ​​giant has committed $1.4 trillion infrastructure commitments in the coming years, making enterprise growth essential to the business model.

“If you think about it from an economic growth perspective, consumers really matter,” Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI, said at a briefing. “But when you look at historically transformative technologies like the steam engine, you really see the greatest economic benefits when companies adopt and scale these technologies.”

OpenAI’s new findings suggest that adoption at larger enterprises is not only growing, but also becoming more integrated into workflows. Employees aren’t just sending more messages; organizations using OpenAI’s API (the developer interface) are consuming 320 times more “reasoning tokens” than a year ago, indicating that companies are using AI for more complex problem solving. That, or they experiment heavily with the new technology and burn tokens, without necessarily getting long-term value.

That increase in reasoning tokens, which correlates with increased energy consumptioncan be expensive for companies and therefore not sustainable in the long term. TechCrunch asked OpenAI about the allocation of enterprise budgets for AI and the sustainability of this growth rate.

In addition to raw usage statistics, OpenAI also sees changes in the way companies deploy their tools. The use of custom GPTs – which companies use to codify institutional knowledge into assistants or automate workflows – has increased 19x this year and now accounts for 20% of business messages, the report found. OpenAI pointed to digital banking client BBVA, which says it regularly uses more than 4,000 custom GPTs.

“It shows how many people are really capable of taking this powerful technology and adapting it to the things that are useful to them,” Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI, said during the briefing.

These integrations have led to significant time savings, according to OpenAI. Participants reported saving 40 to 60 minutes per day with OpenAI’s business products, but that may not include time spent learning the systems or driving or correcting AI output.

The report shows that enterprise workers are also increasingly using AI tools to expand their own capabilities. Three-quarters of respondents say AI allows them to do things, including technical tasks, that they couldn’t do before. OpenAI reported a 36% increase in code-related messages outside of engineering, IT and research teams.

While OpenAI has pushed the idea that its technology democratizes access to skills, it’s important to note that more vibe encryption could lead to more security vulnerabilities and other shortcomings. When asked about this, Lightcap pointed to OpenAI’s recent release of its security researcher agent Aardvarkwhich is in private beta, as a possible way to detect bugs, vulnerabilities and exploits.

OpenAI’s report also shows that even the most active ChatGPT Enterprise users are not using the most advanced tools available to them, such as data analysis, reasoning or search. During the briefing, Lightcap mused that this was because fully adopting AI systems requires a change in mindset and deeper integration with business data and processes. Adopting advanced features will take time, he says, as companies need to redesign their workflows to better understand what’s possible.

Lightcap and Chatterji also highlighted a report finding that showed a “growing gap in AI adoption,” with some “frontier workers” more likely to use more tools to save more time than the “laggards.”

“There are companies that still see these systems very much as a piece of software, something that I can buy and give to my teams, and that’s pretty much the end of it,” Lightcap said. “And then there are companies that are really starting to embrace it, almost more like an operating system. It’s essentially a replatforming of a lot of the company’s business.”

OpenAI’s leadership — which is certainly feeling the pressure of the company’s $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments — has seen this as an opportunity for laggards to catch up. For workers training AI systems to replicate their work, “catching up” can feel more like a countdown.