OpenAI COO says ‘we haven’t seen AI enter business processes yet’

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a new platform called OpenAI Frontier for businesses to create and manage agentsBut OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said businesses haven’t seen AI adoption on a large scale.

“One of the most interesting and encouraging things about the work we’ve been doing recently around the OpenAI Frontier is that we haven’t seen AI companies go into business,” said the AI ​​director at the sideline. The India AI Summit was held last week in New Delhi.

“You have a very powerful AI system that anyone can use on their own.” And businesses are very complex organizations with many people, teams, all having to work together, many activities.

There is a lot of talk around AI assistants based on business processes and say that “SaaS is dead”. Although these predictions have moved SaaS stocks at times, they have not come true. Instead, Lightcap said OpenAI was Slack’s biggest user last yearwhich shows how many AI companies still rely on traditional business software.

In January, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote that the company’s revenue is risingstarting at the end of 2025 with an annual revenue of over $20 billion. Lightcap said demand is strong, without sharing any numbers.

“Almost always we find ourselves having to manage the most important things. We are still a growing organization, so there is something important in the world that we would like to achieve, and we are working as hard as possible to achieve it,” said Lightcap.

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

“Frontier is a way for us to iteratively test how we can bring AI into the most complex and complex business environments that I think if we get it right, we’ll learn more about all business and AI practices,” Lightcap said.

A few days after the discussion with TechCrunch, OpenAI agreed with consultants like Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini to deploy its technology in a business push. Even competitor Anthropic introduced financial, engineering, and design companies to build agents based on Claude.

At the moment, the company doesn’t have a clear way to integrate OpenClaw’s open source tool, but Lightcap said it offers OpenAI “a glimpse into the future” where agents can do “anything you want a computer to do.”

In conjunction with the India AI conference, OpenAI has announced several recent announcements about its business in the world’s largest market. The company said that India is the second largest user base of ChatGPT outside the US, and more than 100 million users every week. Lightcap said that the word as a strategy is being heard in India and making OpenAI reach more people.

“Voice is very important here. And the voice samples are now clear and good enough to be able to run in the lowest and lowest areas, where you can start to be able to get the latest technology to a group of people who were probably more restricted than not,” said Lightcap.

The company also signed an agreement for businesses to use its equipment and deploy computers. Lightcap noted that India ranks fourth in terms of business seats in Asia, which is low for a country with a large population, and OpenAI has significant growth opportunities here.

The AI ​​company is also planning to open two new offices in India in Mumbai and Bengaluru. However, these can be sales offices and go to the market. When I asked Lightcap if the offices would include technology, he said, “Never say so.”

There is also a fear of impact on jobs, especially in countries like India, where IT services and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) are popular, as AI tools automate certain tasks. In the last few weeks, the Indian IT company stocks are down since the market is also considering that areas like copyright may require fewer people. Lightcap said the company is “settled” by what it saw in the labor market.

“Our opinion is that over time, jobs will change. I think we don’t know how, or what, but it seems inevitable that the job will look different in the future than it looks today. And it’s natural, this is part of the business process. It’s part of the global economy that we live in. So I think what we have to do is be able to be kind when they don’t change.