ChatGPT has changed the way most people view and interact with AI, with the tool being used for everything from making travel plans to helping developers code — and its developer, OpenAI, announced Wednesday that it had signed a major enterprise customer, which the company hopes will be a sign of a similar impact in the world of work.
With 100,000 users, management consulting giant PwC becomes OpenAI's largest client to date, and at the same time, the consulting firm becomes OpenAI's first partner to sell the AI company's enterprise services to other businesses.
As part of a larger effort to monetize its generative AI products, backed by the billions of dollars it has raised to date, OpenAi launched ChatGPT's enterprise tier in August 2023. The enterprise tier offers faster, unlimited interactions, and much more flexibility to build customized models for different use cases. It also comes with more analytics and other tools.
But as with any enterprise software, OpenAI will need to convince companies to think of its generative AI products as a large-scale investment in IT, business processes and workforce, rather than small, occasional uses or trials of the company's products.
“PWC is the first partner we've leaned on in this way,” Richard Haslacher, OpenAI's head of global alliances and partnerships, said in an interview. “PwC will be our largest customer, but they're also the first partner to resell ChatGPT Enterprise. This is penetration into an industry vertical, but it also brings an expanded set of services that customers are eager to leverage in an entirely new solution category.”
OpenAI said last month that ChatGPT has about 600,000 users in its enterprise tier, including 93% of Fortune 500 companies, according to Haslacher, who declined to disclose what that means in terms of engagement time across that user base.
This figure will grow significantly when you consider PwC's 100,000 employees in the US, UK and Middle East, which could reach 328,000 if the company expands ChatGPT usage to its global offices.
For PwC, the deal underscores how its business is evolving and what it sees as its next big growth opportunity to win new business for its consulting business.
Brett Greenstein, a partner and “generative AI leader” at PwC, dismissed the notion that the introduction of ChatGPT, or any kind of generative AI assistant, necessarily threatens jobs: rather, the company may be able to expand its business with its existing employee base without having to hire additional staff.
“This is really important to us,” Greenstein said, adding that the company was an early adopter of ChatGPT and upgrading to enterprise made sense as it ramps up its own efforts.
PwC has built its tools around the product itself, but “as our technology stack improves, we're able to buy more things instead of building them, so we can focus on outcomes, transformation, workflows, use cases and business processes and not on assembling APIs to build employee experiences,” he said.
One of the big questions around generative AI is whether it's just hype or whether we'll see continued use of these services. Greenstein declined to say how much genAI products are being used on a day-to-day basis at PwC, but he did note that the educational tools the firm built to develop talent have seen 90% engagement.
More importantly, generative AI could be a major new avenue for consulting firms like PwC to win new business, as part of the company's larger pitch for “digital transformation,” a theme that has dominated IT for years.
“Our customers are on the same path, so we've started to enter into resale agreements,” he said.
ChatGPT's self-service version is $30 per user, and the consumer version is $20 per user. The company doesn't disclose enterprise pricing, and neither PwC nor OpenAI mentioned pricing in this article. This Reddit thread seems to list $60 per seat per month for 150 seats for one year. That's a very high number for 100,000 users, so I would guess these prices vary widely.
OpenAI will continue to engage with enterprises going forward, but it's notable that the company is building this channel strategy to complement them.
“Right now, we have our own customer success team that helps customers with the implementation of our genAI solution,” Haslacher says, “but we have limited capacity, and that's where the partner ecosystem comes in.” Currently, PwC is a reselling partner, but “I think we'll see more of that ecosystem stuff in the future,” he adds.