ChatGPT may have wowed the world since its launch last November, but that hasn’t led to major revenue streams for its creator OpenAI, which also managed to raise $300 million dollars in additional funding post the $10 billion investment from Microsoft. The only option left was to capitalize on the euphoria by converting the solution into an enterprise grade.
And that’s precisely what OpenAI has done now by launching the business edition of its generative AI-based tool. ChatGPT Enterprise is also powered by the AI-led chatbot app and was first introduced via a blogpost by the company earlier this year. It works pretty much the same way as the existing edition, writing emails, drafting essays and debugging code.
Will the add-ons convince enterprise users?
However, there are some new add-ons to the product such as enterprise-grade privacy and additional data analysis capabilities. There’s also some enhanced performance and customization options in the enterprise version, taking it on par with the Big Chat Enterprise, Microsoft’s service that uses the same or similar AI-led innovation.
“Today marks another step towards an AI assistant for work that helps with any task, protects your company data and is customized for your organization,” says OpenAI in a blog post while noting that “Businesses interested in ChatGPT Enterprise should get in contact with us. While we aren’t disclosing pricing, it’ll be dependent on each company’s usage and use cases.”
The new edition comes with an admin console that provides tools to manage how employees within an enterprise use ChatGPT. Additionally, it integrates for single sign-on, domain verification and also provides a dashboard with statistics. There are conversation templates that employees can share in order to build internal workflows using ChatGPT.
Unlimited access to analytics is a good addition
The new offering from OpenAI, which has been spending millions of dollars in just the upkeep of the powerful servers needed to make ChatGPT work, has unlimited access to Advanced Data Analysis (formerly known as Code Interpreter), that allows for data analytics and presentation in the form of creative charts.
“This feature enables both technical and non-technical teams to analyze information in seconds, whether it’s for financial researchers crunching market data, marketers analyzing survey results, or data scientists debugging an ETL script. If you’re looking to tailor ChatGPT to your organization, you can use our new shared chat templates to collaborate and build common workflows. If you need to extend OpenAI into a fully custom solution for your org, our pricing includes free credits to use our API as well,” the blog post says.
The company also clarified that the advanced data analysis feature was available only to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus (costing $20 a month). However, in the new system ChatGPT Enterprise users would be complementary to this user segment. Both are also powered by GPT-4, the flagship AI model of OpenAI.
OpenAI stresses on data ownership and security
The blog post also clarified that the enterprise would own and control their business data over ChatGPT Enterprise. “We do not train on your business data or conversations, and our models do not learn from your usage,” the post said, adding that the new offering is SOC2 compliant and all conversations are encrypted in transit and at rest.
The last point is an obvious effort to allay fears of large enterprises that had restricted usage of ChatGPT in their workplaces. “We believe AI can assist and elevate every aspect of our working lives and make teams more creative and productive,” says the blog post.
The question is will all of this lure businesses?
Of course, it remains to be seen whether the latest effort to monetize an innovation will bear fruit as recent analytics by SimilarWeb indicates a near 10% drop in ChatGPT traffic between May and June with average time spent also declining by 8.5%. Of course, this could be an outcome of the smartphone apps on both iOS and Android systems or may be due to competition.
Without doubt, the company needs to show some revenues coming from the innovation, which reportedly cost them more than $540 million to build last year, a good chunk of which was to acquire AI talent from large companies such as Google. Moreover, there are estimates floating around that it costs $700,000 a day to run ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has obviously got investor pressure on his back, given that the company only raised $30 million in revenues during 2022, a figure that he has since promised to boost by about eight times in 2023 and take it up to $1 billion by end of 2024. Quite obviously, the company requires enterprise customers to meet these targets.
