OpenAI is coming with sweet business investment in 2026

OpenAI has reshuffled some of its leadership and appointed a familiar face to lead the sale of AI to enterprise customers as the company looks to acquire new competitors in 2026.

The company has appointed Barrett Zoph to lead its efforts to market its AI to businesses, according to report from The Informationciting an internal OpenAI memo.

TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more.

Zoph returned to OpenAI last week leaving Thinking Machine Labsformer co-founder of OpenAI Mira Murati’s AI startup where Zoph has served as co-founder and chief technology officer since October 2024.

The exact circumstances of his departure are unknown, and Rumors are swirling about whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees were fired or left by their willprobably with plans to return to OpenAI all the time.

Zoph was previously the vice president of post-academic management at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He is going to a very different place and will probably have a more important role for the company as it looks to grow its business – an area where it is losing opportunities to its competitors.

OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023 more than a year before Anthropic, and several years before Google launched their product. The company says the product has more than 5 million business users and counts companies including SoftBank, Target and Loewe as customers.

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

Anthropic has a great leader At its AI competition when it comes to using major business languages. The AI ​​research lab has a 40% market share, according to a December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures (who, it should be noted, invested heavily in Anthropic). In July, the initial market share is expected to be 32%.

Adoption of Google Gemini has been massive, says Menlo Ventures. The company released its earnings report last fall and noted that its LLM business used in the market remained flat, growing from 20% in July to 21% at the end of the year.

On the other hand, OpenAI has seen the market in use drop from 50% in 2023 to 27% by the end of 2025 – which seems to be affecting the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman he complained that the development of Google Gemini started intruding on OpenAI in an internal memo a few months ago.

Business growth is the company’s focus area in 2026, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote in blog post during the week.

The company also announced about developing a multi-year partnership and ServiceNow which will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.