“Our goal is simple” – OpenAI tells us how enterprise adoption can help take it to the next level, so get ready for a lot more ChatGPT at work
It’s fair to say that no other company (except Nvidia) has helped shape the AI tools revolution as much as OpenAI.
The company is still (at the time of writing) only three years old, but thanks to the success of ChatGPT, it has become a household name, synonymous with AI platforms for many everyday users.
But how can OpenAI now take this widespread adoption and awareness and spread it among businesses, where the real investment really lies? I spoke to Matt Weaver, Head of EMEA Solutions Engineering at OpenAI, to find out more.
Business orientation
I speak to Weaver shortly after its recent OpenAI Dev Day, the company’s latest flagship event, where it revealed a host of new announcements designed to help developers get to grips with its services.
“Our goal is simple,” he says, “is to enable anyone, from a developer perspective, with an idea and a few lines of code, to build the next great company on our platform… and we try to give them all the tools to do that.”
This includes the new AgentKit and AgentBuilder platforms – tools that should make it easier for developers working with OpenAI’s APIs to create agents, combined with improved UI components.
There is also Codex, an agent coding model that can now be used by developers wherever they work, whether in terminal, IDEs, or in the cloud, as well as a Slack plugin that allows developers to chat with Codex in the online collaboration tool, and a Codex SDK to enable production of Codex before shipping the code.
Finally, applications in ChatGPT will allow businesses to develop a UI or UX that allows businesses to access ChatGPT itself, presenting what Weaver calls “a whole new opportunity for businesses…to meet users where they are.”
“What we find when we work with companies – and this breaks my heart sometimes,” says Weaver, “is that we’ll work at five different companies, and they’re all building the same scaffolding to make their applications work, rather than spending time working on what’s really going to differentiate their business.”
“In the launches that we have, from start-ups to global enterprises, we’re really trying to make OpenAI the best place for builders to actually come and build their applications using GenAI. »
“Top to bottom, bottom to top”
Unlike many other successful tech platforms in recent years, ChatGPT became popular with consumers and enthusiasts before being widely adopted by businesses – and that’s something that Weaver believes is helping to increase awareness and appetite for businesses.
“Most people use ChatGPT in their personal lives and show up to work expecting the same access, the same level of intelligence, the same ease of use.” Weaver said, noting that there are currently more than five million paid pro users.
“It can be tempting to launch a big, ambitious transformation project that completely transforms the way your company operates, but if you don’t couple that with a culture of AI among your employees, you often risk failure,” he says, describing the company’s “top-down, bottom-up” vision, which combines big bets with widespread employee adoption of AI tools.
Weaver adds that often when the company deploys ChatGPT Enterprise in a large organization, it hosts hackathons that often “find incredibly valuable use cases for deploying AI that senior management never thought of.”
On a lighter note, Weaver also notes that he uses a transcription recording mode tool for meeting summaries and a voice dictation tool to summarize key events from his work day – and that he also uses the ChatGPT agent and Deep Research to help him plan his own wedding.
Aligned with the mission
To wrap up our call, I ask Weaver how he and his team manage to stay focused and aligned, given OpenAI’s seemingly incredible pace of development.
“OpenAI is a very mission-aligned company, you feel it when you’re here – and the mission is to build AGI for the benefit of everyone, so when you make big decisions… it’s with that in mind,” he says.
“I think the main thing is not to get distracted by the noise that’s going on outside – a lot of people have a lot to say about what they think OpenAI does, and actually inside it’s remarkable how calm and focused the atmosphere is, because we have a mission, we know what it is, we know what it will take to get to the next step – and we can’t forget that over 800 million people are counting on us every week.”
