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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“Frontier is a way for us to experiment iteratively with how to actually bring AI into the really messy and complex areas of businesses that I think if we get that right, we’re going to learn a lot about both businesses and also AI systems,” Lightcap noted.
Days after TechCrunch’s conversation, OpenAI partnered with consultancies like Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini to deploy its technology in an enterprise push. Even rival Anthropic launched plugins for finance, engineering, and design for enterprises to build agents based on Claude.
Meanwhile, the company doesn’t have a clear path of integrating recently acquired open-source tool OpenClaw, but Lightcap said that it gives OpenAI “a glimpse into the future” where agents can do “almost anything you want them to be able to do on a computer.”
In keeping with the India AI summit, OpenAI has made a number of recent announcements around its business in the world’s largest market. The company said India was the second biggest user base of ChatGPT outside the U.S., with more than 100 million weekly users. Lightcap said that voice as a modality is picking up in India and enabling OpenAI to reach more people.
“Voice is so important here. And voice models now feel good enough and also good enough to run in low-latency and low-bandwidth environments, where you really can start to enable access to technology for a group of people who maybe were more disenfranchised than not,” Lightcap said.
The company also signed an enterprise contract for the usage of its tools and to deploy compute. Lightcap noted India is fourth in India in terms of enterprise seats in Asia, which is low for a populous country, and OpenAI has a lot of scope to expand here.
The AI company is also set to open two new offices in India in Mumbai and Bengaluru. However, these are likely to be sales and go-to-market offices. When I asked Lightcap if these offices would include technical talent, he said, “Never say never.”
There is also a fear of job impact, especially in countries like India, where the IT services and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry is prominent, as AI tools automate some of the tasks. In the past few weeks, Indian IT company stocks have dipped as the market is taking into account the fact that areas like coding might require fewer humans. Lightcap said that the company is being “grounded” in what it has observed in terms of jobs market.
“Our view is that over time, jobs will change. I think we don’t yet know where, how, or what, but it seems inevitable that work will look different in the future than it looks today. And that’s natural, that’s part of the business cycle. It’s part of the global and dynamic economy that we live in. And so I think what we have to do is be able to obviously have empathy for where jobs are changing at a high rate,” he noted.
