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 hired Barrett Zoff to lead its efforts to sell its AI to companies, according to a report from The Information, citing an internal OpenAI memo.

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

Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, the former AI startup of 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, with rumors circulating as to whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees were fired or left on their own, perhaps 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 Lowe’s as customers.

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

Anthropic has a commanding lead over its AI competitors when it comes to using the large enterprise language model. The AI ​​research lab has a 40% market share, according to a December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures (which, it should be noted, has invested heavily in Anthropic). In July, the startup’s market share was estimated at 32%.

Google’s adoption of Gemini has been more consistent, according to Menlo Ventures. The company released its enterprise product last fall and has seen its share of the enterprise LLM usage market remain largely flat, according to Menlo’s findings, 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. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, specifically expressed concern that Google Gemini’s growth was starting to encroach on OpenAI in an internal memo a few months ago.

Enterprise growth is an area of ​​focus for the company in 2026, Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, wrote in a blog post last Sunday.

The company has since announced an expanded, multi-year partnership with ServiceNow that will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.