OpenAI is coming for those sweet enterprise dollars in 2026

OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership and chosen a familiar face to lead its push to sell AI to business clients as the company looks to catch up with its rivals in 2026.

The company has appointed Barrett Zoff to lead its efforts to sell AI to businesses Report informationCiting an internal OpenAI memo.

TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information.

Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after that Leaving the Thinking Machine Labsan AI startup affiliated with former OpenAI co-founder Mira Moratti, where Zoff has served as co-founder and CTO since October 2024.

The exact circumstances of his departure are not clear Rumors are swirling About whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees have been fired or let go Of their own volitionperhaps with plans to return to OpenAI all along.

Zoph was previously vice president of post-training inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He’s moving into a completely different role and will likely play an important role at the company as it looks to grow its enterprise business — an area in which it has been 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 including SoftBank, Target and Loewe’s as customers.

But its market share is declining while its competitors are rising.

Anthropic holds the lead over its AI competitors when it comes to using the large enterprise language model. The Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory has a market share of 40%, according to A December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures (Which, it should be noted, is heavily invested in Anthropics.) In July, the startup’s market share was estimated at 32%.

Menlo Ventures says Google’s adoption of Gemini has been more consistent. The company released its enterprise product last fall and saw its share of the enterprise LLM usage market remain largely flat, rising from 20% in July to 21% at the end of the year.

On the other hand, OpenAI has seen its usage market share decline from 50% in 2023 to 27% at the end of 2025 – a trend that seems to worry the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman He expressed his concern That Google Gemini’s growth began encroaching on OpenAI was revealed in an internal memo a few months ago.

Enterprise growth is an area of ​​focus for the company in 2026, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote in an article. Blog post Sunday.

The company has since announced Expanding the multi-year partnership With ServiceNow which will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.