Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a new platform called OpenAI Frontier for enterprises to build and manage agents, but OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said that businesses haven’t yet seen AI adoption at scale.
“One of the interesting things and some of the inspiration for the work we’ve been doing lately around OpenAI Frontier is we have not yet really seen enterprise AI penetrate enterprise business process,” the AI exec said on the sidelines of the India AI summit held last week in New Delhi.
“You’ve got really powerful AI systems that any person can use in their individual capacity. And enterprises are these highly complex organizations with a lot of people, teams, all having to work together, a lot of context. There are very complex goals that have to be achieved using a lot of different systems and tools.”
There is a lot of talk around AI agents taking over business processes and claiming that “SaaS is dead”. While these predictions have moved SaaS stocks at times, they haven’t really come true. In fact, Lightcap said OpenAI was a massive Slack user last year, indicating how much AI firms are still reliant on traditional enterprise software.
In January, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar posted that the company’s revenue is on the rise, with the startup ending 2025 with over $20 billion in annualized revenue. Lightcap said that demand is strong, without sharing any numbers.
“We almost always find ourselves having to manage too much demand. We are still an organization that is growing, and so there is this global demand factor that we would love to be able to meet, and we are working as best as we can to be able to meet,” Lightcap said.
At the same time, OpenAI is thinking about how to quantify success in the enterprise. Lightcap said that OpenAI will try to measure Frontier’s impact based on “business outcomes, not on seat licenses.” (The comapny hasn’t yet shared pricing for Frontier.)
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