GoKawiilFidji Simo, CEO of Instacart Inc., speaks during an interview in San Francisco, March 3, 2022.
OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, held an all-hands meeting with staffers last week and said the company is committed to helping businesses, and is "orienting aggressively" towards high-productivity use cases.
OpenAI kickstarted the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, and the chatbot now supports more than 900 million weekly active users. But the company is still racing to grab market share, particularly in the enterprise, away from rivals like Google and Anthropic, which is also weighing an IPO.
"Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users," Simo said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting reviewed by CNBC. "We'll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool."
The Wall Street Journal was first to report the all-hands meeting.
OpenAI's IPO could land as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The exact timing is still subject to change, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
CFO Sarah Friar is building out OpenAI's finance team ahead of a market debut, hiring Ajmere Dale, the former chief accounting officer at Block, and Cynthia Gaylor, the former CFO of DocuSign , earlier this year. Gaylor will oversee investor relations as part of her role, according to a LinkedIn post.
In December, OpenAI declared a "code red" effort to improve ChatGPT in the face of increasingly stiff competition from Google and Anthropic. The company temporarily pulled back on other investments in areas like health, shopping and advertising.
Simo said during the March all-hands meeting that OpenAI is moving with the same amount of urgency that it did in December, but noted that the company can't declare everything an emergency.
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