“We have yet to really see AI penetrate enterprise business processes,” says OpenAI COO

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a new platform called OpenAI Frontier for enterprises to build and manage agents, but Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI, said companies have yet to see widespread AI adoption.

“One of the interesting things and some inspiration for the work we’ve done recently around OpenAI Frontier is that we have yet to really see enterprise AI penetrating enterprise business processes,” the AI ​​executive said on the sidelines of the India AI Summit held last week in New Delhi.

“You have really powerful AI systems that anyone can use in their individual capacity. Organizations are these very complex organizations with a lot of people, teams, that all have to work together, and a lot of context. There are very complex goals that have to be achieved using a lot of different systems and tools.”

There is a lot of talk about AI agents taking over business processes and claiming that “SaaS is dead.” While these expectations have moved SaaS stocks at times, they have never really materialized. In fact, Lightcap said OpenAI was one of the most widespread users of Slack last year, indicating how much AI companies rely on traditional enterprise software.

In January, OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar, posted that the company’s revenue was on the rise, with the startup ending 2025 with more than $20 billion in annual revenue. Lightcap said demand is strong, without sharing any numbers.

“We almost always find ourselves having to manage a lot of demand. We are still a growing organization, so there is a factor of global demand that we would like to be able to meet, and we are working as best we can to be able to meet it,” Lightcap said.

At the same time, OpenAI is thinking about how to measure success in an organization. OpenAI will try to measure Frontier’s impact based on “business results, not seat licenses,” Lightcap said. (The company has not yet shared pricing for Frontier.)

“Frontier is a way for us to iteratively experiment with how to actually bring AI into really messy and complex areas of business, and I think if we do it right, we’ll learn a lot about both companies and also AI systems,” Lightcap noted.

Days after the TechCrunch conversation, OpenAI partnered with consulting firms like Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini to deploy its technology in an enterprise push. Competitor Anthropic has even launched enterprise finance, engineering, and design plugins to build cloud-based agents.

Meanwhile, the company doesn’t have a clear path to integrating its recently acquired open source OpenClaw tool, but Lightcap said it gives OpenAI “a glimpse into the future” where agents can do “almost anything you want them to be able to do on a computer.”

In line with the India AI Summit, OpenAI has made a number of recent announcements about its business in the world’s largest market. India was ChatGPT’s second-largest user base outside the US, with more than 100 million weekly users, the company said. Voice as a modality is on the rise in India and enables OpenAI to reach more people, Lightcap said.

“Sound is very important here. Sound is very important here,” Lightcap said. And voice models now feel good enough and also good enough to work in low-latency, low-bandwidth environments, where you can really start to enable access to technology for a group of people who may have been more underserved than others.”

The company also signed an enterprise contract to use its tools and compute deployment. Lightcap noted that India ranks fourth in terms of enterprise seats in Asia, which is low for a populous country, and OpenAI has a lot of room to expand here.

The AI ​​company is also set to open two new offices in India in Mumbai and Bengaluru. However, these are likely to be sales and go-to-market offices. When I asked Lightcap if these offices would house technical talent, he said, “Never say never.”

There is also fear of the impact on jobs, especially in countries like India, where the IT services and business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is emerging, where AI tools automate some tasks. In the past few weeks, shares of Indian IT companies have fallen, as the market takes into account the fact that areas such as programming may require fewer humans. Lightcap said the company is “anchored” by what it has observed regarding the job market.

“Our view is that jobs will change over time,” he noted. “I think we don’t yet know where or how or what, but it seems inevitable that work will look different in the future than it does today. That’s normal, that’s part of the business cycle. It’s part of the global, dynamic economy that we live in. And so I think what we have to do is be able to clearly empathize with the places where jobs are changing at a high rate.”