OpenAI signs 100K PwC staff to ChatGPT’s enterprise tier as PwC becomes its first resale partner

ChatGPT has modified how most individuals regard and interact with AI, and the tool has been used widely to do the whole lot from create travel itineraries to assisting developers with coding. Now, its creator, OpenAI, on Wednesday announced that it has signed a significant enterprise customer that it hopes will likely be a signal of how an identical effect could play out on the earth of labor. 

PwC, the management consulting giant, will change into OpenAI’s biggest customer so far, covering 100,000 users. Alongside that, the consulting firm will change into OpenAI’s first partner for selling the AI company’s enterprise offerings to other businesses.

OpenAi launched ChatGPT’s enterprise tier in August 2023 as a part of a giant swing to monetize its generative AI products on the back of the billions it has raised so far. The enterprise tier offers faster, unlimited interactions, and is rather more flexible for constructing customized models for various use cases. It also comes with more analytics and other tools. 

But as with every enterprise software, OpenAI will still should persuade firms to make the shift from small and occasional use, or pilots, of its generative AI products and consider it as a significant IT, business process and workforce investment.

“PWC is the primary partner that we’re leaning into in this manner,” said Richard Hasslacher, OpenAI’s global head of alliances and partnerships, in an interview. “PwC becomes our largest customer, but they’re also our first partner who’s going to be reselling ChatGPT enterprise… It’s penetration into industry verticals, but additionally providing an expansive set of services that customers desperately have to reap the benefits of in a brand latest solution category.”

OpenAI last month disclosed that ChatGPT’s enterprise tier had around 600,000 users, which in line with Hasslacher, includes 93% of all Fortune 500 firms. He declined to reveal what that works out to by way of engagement time across that user base. 

PwC’s 100,000 employees within the U.S., U.K. and the Middle East would boost that number substantially. When, and if, the firm expands its usage of ChatGPT to the remainder of its global operations, that would include 328,000 employees. 

For PwC, the deal underscores the way it believes its own business will likely be evolving in addition to the subsequent big growth opportunity for winning latest deals for its consulting business.

Bret Greenstein, partner and “generative AI leader” at PwC, waved off the concept that adopting ChatGPT, or any type of generative AI assistant, will necessarily threaten jobs. As a substitute, it would let the corporate grow business on the worker base that it already has with no need so as to add more people. 

“This could be very necessary for us,” said Greenstein. He added that the firm was an early adopter of ChatGPT, and so moving as much as enterprise made sense because it ramped up its own engagement. 

PwC has been constructing tools across the product itself, “but because the technology stack gets higher, we should buy versus construct more things. We are able to then focus more on outcomes, transformation, workflow, use cases, and business process, and fewer on assembling APIs to construct an experience for our employees,” he said. 

One in all the large questions around generative AI has been whether it’s just hype or if we’ll see sustained usage of those services. Greenstein declined to say how much genAI products are getting used each day at PwC, but noted that the education tools the corporate has built to assist train people have received 90% engagement. 

More importantly, generative AI could represent a significant latest avenue for consulting firms like PwC for choosing up latest business — that’s a part of a much bigger pitch it makes around “digital transformation,” which has been a significant theme in IT for years.

“Our clients are going through the identical journey, so we’re embarking on a reselling agreement,” he said.

ChatGPT’s self-service version costs $30 per user, while the buyer edition is $20 per user. The corporate doesn’t disclose enterprise pricing publicly, and neither PwC nor OpenAI would discuss pricing for this text. This thread on Reddit seems to point $60 per seat, per 30 days for 150 seats for a yr. That runs to a very high number should you do the mathematics for 100,000 users, so my guess is that these rates vary quite a bit.

OpenAI will still engage with enterprises, but it surely’s notable that the corporate is constructing out this channel technique to complement that. 

“Today, we’ve our own customer success team that may support our customers within the deployment of their genAI solutions,” said Hasslacher. “But we’ve limited capability, and that’s really where the partner ecosystem comes into play.” Fow now PwC is its reselling partner, but “I believe you will likely be seeing quite a bit more related to that ecosystem”, he added.