OpenAI's ambitious drive into enterprise AI is starting to show real results—and real challenges.
This week, we got both a look behind the curtain at enterprise adoption of OpenAI's ChatGPT and a new interview with its chief commercial officer about the company’s enterprise strategy.
Together, they paint a picture of the massive opportunities ahead to transform enterprises with AI and just how hard it can be to seize those opportunities.
In the process, they provide some useful guidance for enterprise leaders looking to pilot or scale AI.
I got the full breakdown from Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 125 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
First, we got to see what happens when ChatGPT Enterprise is deployed at scale in a new case study of Spanish banking giant BBVA from The Wall Street Journal.
Six months ago, BBVA started with 3,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses. (They plan on getting even more in 2025.) So far, their employees have created over 2,900 custom GPTs for specific tasks including legal, marketing, and finance functions.
That’s impressive. But the results are even more so.
In these six months, 80% of users at BBVA report saving more than two hours of work weekly—a massive time savings across thousands of employees.
“The thing that jumped out at me is the value,” says Roetzer. “Build the things that are going to create value for people right out of the gate.”
That happens when you empower employees themselves to identify their own use cases and build solutions for them, often through easy-to-use technology like custom GPTs, just like BBVA did.
Now, just because the results so far have been great doesn’t mean the company hasn’t hit some roadblocks.
BBVA is struggling next to truly integrate ChatGPT Enterprise with their own systems in order to use more of their unique data.
“We have systems that are very complex. And it’s not that simple to think of an integration of a tool—let’s say GPT—with them,” Elena Alfaro, BBVA’s Head of Global AI Adoption told The Journal.
BBVA’s story is just one example of ChatGPT Enterprise deployment. But you’re going to hear a lot more of these stories if OpenAI has its way.
In an interview with The Information, OpenAI’s chief commercial officer, Giancarlo "GC" Lionetti, said the company is making an aggressive push into enterprise sales to hit an ambitious $100 billion revenue target by 2029.
As a result, the company has expanded the sales team to 300 people (up from 200 in June) and won notable deals with enterprises like Moderna, Lowe's, and T-Mobile. (That last one alone was a $100 million contract.)
Lionetti said in the interview that he sees a clear progress of enterprise AI adoption. 2023 was the year of experimentation. 2024 was about solving specific business problems. And 2025 is about scaling AI across entire organizations.
Roetzer says he agrees that 2025 will be about scaling AI across organizations—but there’s a catch.
“For that to be true, enterprises are going to have to quickly start doing the things that are needed to be part of the scaling AI process,” he says.
That includes the steps that Roetzer educates enterprises on in his free Scaling AI webinar and paid Scaling AI course.
For companies looking to follow BBVA's lead, Roetzer emphasizes five essential steps, including:
But many enterprises Roetzer works with simply aren’t there yet—and they need to be.
"I don't know very many enterprises that are doing those five things well," he notes. "And if they think that next year is the year of scaling AI, then we have to really ramp that up.”