OpenAI is coming for those sweet enterprise dollars in 2026

OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership and picked a familiar face to lead sales of AI to enterprise customers as the company looks to overtake its rivals by 2026.

The company has appointed Barret Zoph to lead efforts to sell its AI to companies reporting from The Informationciting an internal OpenAI memo.

TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information.

Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, the AI ​​startup of former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, where Zoph had served as co-founder and CTO since October 2024.

The exact circumstances of his departure are not clear rumors swirl about whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees have been fired or left on your ownpossibly with plans to return to OpenAI all the time.

Zoph previously served as vice president of post-training inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He steps into a very different position and will likely play an important role at the company as it looks to grow its business – an area where it is losing ground to competitors.

OpenAI launched its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023, more than a year before Anthropic and several years before Google launched its enterprise offerings. The company claims the product has more than 5 million business users and counts companies like SoftBank, Target and Lowe’s as customers.

But its market share is falling while its rivals are rising.

Anthropic has a dominant lead over its AI rivals when it comes to the use of large language models in enterprises. The AI ​​research laboratory has a 40% market share, according to A. December report from venture capital firm Menlo Ventures (which, it should be noted, has been aggressively investing in Anthropic). In July, the startup’s market share was estimated at 32%.

According to Menlo Ventures, Google Gemini adoption is more stable. The company released its enterprise product last fall and saw its market share for enterprise LLM usage remain largely the same, according to Menlo’s findings, growing from 20% in July to 21% by year’s end.

OpenAI, on the other hand, has seen its usage market share drop from 50% in 2023 to 27% at the end of 2025 – a trend that appears to be worrying the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman specifically expressed concern in an internal memo a few months ago that Google Gemini’s growth was starting to erode OpenAI.

Enterprise growth is a focus area for the company in 2026, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post last Sunday.

The company has since extensive multi-year collaboration with ServiceNow giving ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.