In its continued effort to target enterprise customers and become profitable, OpenAI on Monday launched the OpenAI Deployment Co., a new consulting firm to help organizations build and deploy AI systems.
Separately, the generative AI vendor said it will acquire Tomoro, an applied AI consulting and engineering firm.
The move, which follows archrival Anthropic’s formation earlier this month of a company with several Wall Street financial services firms to sell and install AI tools to businesses, reflects the AI startups’ ambition to cut into the lucrative consulting business dominated by big firms like Accenture and Deloitte. The vendors are also mimicking the approach of Palantir, the big data, analytics and AI vendor, which uses what are known as “forward-deployed engineers” at client companies, to circumvent traditional consulting firms.
“We are looking at AI companies now looking themselves in the mirror and then deciding that they just want to be Palantir in a way,” said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. “It’s essentially having that integrated end-to-end sort of infrastructure all the way to a deployment-type business model.”
DeployCo, as it is known for short, is a majority-owned and controlled subsidiary of OpenAI, unlike the Anthropic setup in which the vendor is a minority partner. The unit launched with more than $4 billion in initial investment, which OpenAI said it will use to scale operations and acquire firms. DeployCo will use embedded engineers specialized in AI deployment into organizations, the vendor said. With the new partnership, OpenAI is also partnering with 19 investment and consulting firms, including TPG, Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield.
Meanwhile, OpenAI said that, with its acquisition of Tomoro, 150 engineers from that company will join DeployCo. They will work on-site at enterprises to design, test and deploy production-ready AI systems that deliver the greatest value.
A Deployment Strategy
The new focus on deployment shows that AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are recognizing that enterprises still struggle to install and effectively use AI technology, said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner.
“There’s a lot of piloting that’s happening within the enterprise, but a lot of customers are not seeing clear value, and some of that is primarily because they don’t have the internal expertise,” Chandrasekaran said.
For OpenAI and Anthropic, providing expertise with their own deployment services is an opportunity.
“They recognize that the real revenue opportunity exists where the rubber meets the road,” said David Nicholson, an analyst at Futurum Group. He added that the opportunity comes not only with developing and selling new but also “the people who will actually help enterprises take these fancy toys and turn them into business value.”
He said that because OpenAI does not have all the people needed to help translate its models into business value, its partnership with investment and consulting firms like TPG and Bain Capital, as well as its acquisition of Tomoro, will help it in its new venture.
Some Challenges
However, OpenAI could meet obstacles in consulting because the business is vendor-specific, Nicholson said.
“Enterprises are looking at integrating whatever open AI offers with everything else that the enterprise is already doing,” he said. “The people who have the most experience with integrating ten different things from ten different vendors are not one or another of those vendors. It is going to be a third party that specializes in integrating and deploying everything.”
The vendor will also need to address conflicts that arise with partners offering similar services, Chandrasekaran said.
“OpenAI needs to have clear swim lanes in terms of what they will do, vis-à-vis what the partners will do,” he said.
Another consideration for OpenAI is pricing and the duration it plans to keep its forward-deployed engineers inside in the customer environment, Chandrasekaran added.
