OpenAI is Salesforce
The sought-after startup likely has a much more mundane future ahead of it.
When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the masses in November 2022, they were spellbound — for a bit.
The tool seems amazing at answering questions. In real language. Like a person. It gives the veneer of talking to a living, thinking human being. Of course, that’s not actually the case, and with some time, it shows. ChatGPT is highly fallible, plays fast and loose with the facts, and hallucinates. OpenAI’s image generator DALL-E comes up with amazing visuals, but they can also be highly problematic and just plain unsettling. Sora can create lifelike videos with nothing more than a text prompt, but also doesn’t get physics or the human body. These tools do a pretty good job replicating the outside world by matching its patterns but don’t actually know anything. And, while these tools are very useful at some things, those things are narrower and less interesting than generative-AI boosters will say. They also absolutely need adult supervision.
OpenAI’s business will likely continue apace, but it’s likely to do so in a much more humdrum manner than it started out. In other words, OpenAI is the new Salesforce.
Salesforce is the unsexy stalwart supporting the boring, behind-the-scenes acronyms that make modern corporations work. CRM! SaaS! Pipeline! Workflows! Data analytics! Its workhorse tools make Salesforce boatloads of money, as most major companies rely on the CRM platform for multiple aspects of their business and therefore have no choice but to pay the tithe.
It’s in this arena where OpenAI could ultimately thrive, too.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a consummate salesman, pitching a future where AI will replace us all. It could certainly replace parts of jobs, much like automation has been doing for years. Earlier this year, job board Indeed found that not one of the 2,800 common job skills Indeed researched were “very likely” to be replaced by current generative-AI technology. Still, a number of tasks in common jobs — accounting, customer service, programming, marketing, graphic design — are rife for disruption by AI, and there’s already outsize interest from some of those industries.
From OpenAI’s latest PR blitz, it looks like the startup is already donning corporate duds. The 12 days of “shipmas” were largely a commercial snoozefest, but the enterprise promise is clearer: unlimited access to its reasoning models for $200 a month; the ability to customize models for specialized use cases, including legal, financial, engineering, and insurance applications; even folders for projects! In about a year, OpenAI grew to more than a million Enterprise customers, acclimating them to products like ChatGPT summarizing emails and transcribing meeting minutes. Business customers are far more lucrative than regular users, and OpenAI is clearly angling for more.
Don’t believe me? Look at Salesforce, which seems to be trying to become OpenAI before OpenAI can become Salesforce. Salesforce grew its enterprise customer base notably slower than OpenAI has.
“There’s a huge demand for AI products in the enterprise,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said recently on The Wall Street Journal’s “Tech News Briefing” podcast, where he touted his company’s AI product, Agentforce. He said the AI agents are able to perform a number of tasks and even replace some workers in sales, marketing, and customer service.
He’s hoping that the company’s increased forays into AI coupled with its existing suite of business tools will keep it at the bleeding edge of corporate use cases.
“I think we all got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid, where we’re like, ‘And what is that chicken-soup recipe? And can you summarize these 10 articles? Oh my gosh, cancer is cured,’” he said. “We’ve got to keep these things in perspective. It’s a tool.”
OpenAI’s products, just like Salesforce’s, are tools, ones that will shine a lot more in business use cases and will likely become the next product in every company’s tech suite they can’t remember how to function without.
