OpenAI is coming for those sweet enterprise dollars in 2026

OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership and picked a familiar face to lead its push into selling AI to business customers as the company looks to catch up to its rivals in 2026.

The company appointed Barret Zoph to lead its efforts to sell its AI to enterprises, according to reporting from The Information, citing an internal OpenAI memo.

TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information.

Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s AI startup where Zoph had served as a co-founder and CTO since October 2024.

The exact circumstances of his departure aren’t clear, with rumors swirling about whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees were fired or left on their own accord, possibly with plans to return to OpenAI all along.

Zoph was previously the vice president of post-training inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He’s stepping into a very different position and will likely play an important role at the company as it looks to grow its enterprise business — an area where it is losing ground to competitors.

OpenAI launched its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023 more than a year before Anthropic and multiple 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 falling while its rivals are climbing.

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

Google’s Gemini adoption has been steadier, according to Menlo Ventures. The company released its enterprise product last fall and has seen its enterprise LLM usage market share largely stay the same, per Menlo’s findings, growing from 20% in July to 21% at the end of the year.

OpenAI on the other hand has seen its usage market share drop from 50% in 2023 to 27% at the end of 2025 — a trend that appears to concern the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed concern specifically 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, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post this past Sunday.

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