OpenAI is clearly setting the stage for a more aggressive OpenAI enterprise AI push in 2026 — and it’s starting at the top.
The company has quietly reshuffled leadership and brought back a familiar executive to lead its renewed effort to win over business customers. According to internal reporting cited by The Information, OpenAI has appointed Barret Zoph to spearhead enterprise sales, signaling just how seriously it’s taking the competitive pressure in the enterprise AI market.
Zoph rejoined OpenAI last week after a short stint at Thinking Machine Labs, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. He had served there as co-founder and CTO since late 2024. While the circumstances surrounding his departure remain unclear, his return places him in a very different role — one focused squarely on revenue, adoption, and market share.
Previously, Zoph was OpenAI’s vice president of post-training inference, a deeply technical position. Now, he’s stepping into a commercial leadership role at a time when OpenAI’s dominance in enterprise AI is being challenged on multiple fronts.
Enterprise momentum is slipping
OpenAI may have been early to market with ChatGPT Enterprise, launching the product back in 2023. The company says the platform now serves more than 5 million business users, with customers including SoftBank, Target, and Lowe’s. But early leadership hasn’t guaranteed long-term control.
Recent data paints a sobering picture for the OpenAI enterprise AI push. According to a December report from Menlo Ventures, Anthropic now leads enterprise large language model usage with roughly 40% market share — up significantly from earlier in the year. Meanwhile, Google has steadily grown adoption of Gemini across enterprise customers since launching its business offering last fall.
OpenAI, by contrast, has seen its enterprise usage share fall sharply — from about 50% in 2023 to roughly 27% by the end of 2025. That decline has reportedly raised internal alarms. CEO Sam Altman previously warned in an internal memo that Google’s progress with Gemini was beginning to encroach on OpenAI’s core customer base.
2026 is the reset year
The company isn’t hiding its intentions. Enterprise expansion is a top priority for 2026, according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who highlighted business adoption as a core growth pillar in a recent blog post.
Backing that strategy, OpenAI has also expanded its multi-year partnership with ServiceNow, allowing ServiceNow customers direct access to OpenAI’s models inside enterprise workflows. It’s a move designed to meet businesses where they already operate — and to slow the momentum of rivals embedding AI directly into productivity and infrastructure platforms.
Why this matters
The enterprise AI market is shaping up to be the most lucrative and defensible battleground in generative AI. Unlike consumer chatbots, business contracts are long-term, sticky, and deeply integrated into operations. Winning here isn’t about hype — it’s about reliability, governance, security, and real ROI.
By putting a seasoned technical leader in charge of go-to-market execution, OpenAI is signaling that its enterprise AI push is entering a new phase — one focused less on experimentation and more on execution.
Whether that’s enough to regain lost ground against Anthropic and Google will become clearer in 2026. But one thing is already certain: OpenAI is done playing defense in the enterprise AI race.