Dive Brief:
- OpenAI unveiled a partner program for enterprise resellers, independent software developers and consulting firms at its first partner summit, held in San Francisco over the weekend. The AI model maker pledged $150 million in initial funding to the nascent OpenAI Partner Network, according to the Sunday announcement.
- The company opened a partner network portal for the program, which has a three-tier structure that rewards sales, technical certifications, co-sell engagement and deployment experience. OpenAI aims to have 300,000 consultants trained and certified in GPT tools by the end of the year.
- “We’re entering a new phase of AI adoption in the enterprise, and partners are the multipliers for helping customers realize and scale value from frontier technologies,” Colleen Kapase, VP of strategic global partnerships and ecosystems, said on LinkedIn. OpenAI drafted the former Google Cloud partner program VP to lead its channel charge less than two months ago.
Dive Insight:
OpenAI’s channel push comes amid controversy over the public release of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5, just three months after the rival model maker rolled out its Claude Partner Network.
The two competitors are following a parallel playbook, cementing early alliances with large global system integrators and committing millions of dollars to partner training and technical guidance initiatives.
Over the weekend, OpenAI announced a select group of inaugural partners, including Accenture, Bain, BCG, Eliza, McKinsey and PwC. The company is piloting a Forward Deployed Experts initiative that echoes Anthropic’s promise to increase partner-facing engineering support fivefold.
The partner program marks OpenAI’s pivot from consumer-focused ChatGPT models toward the lucrative and less fickle enterprise space, Arun Chandrasekaran, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst, said.
“OpenAI has started to realize that when you're talking about enterprise-wide transformation, it's not merely a technology transformation,” Chandrasekaran told Channel Dive. “It is a business model transformation, and who knows business model transformation? It's the big consulting companies.”
Gartner sees the competition over which provider has the biggest, baddest LLM shifting to a platform-building race as OpenAI and Anthropic appeal to potential investors ahead of recently announced IPOs. The pivot is likely to drive more favorable pricing and other commercial concessions, Gartner said in a Friday report.
“The market is dictating Open AI's behavior, unlike two or three years ago when OpenAI was dictating what the market needs,” Chandrasekaran said. “The company wants to focus on initiatives with near-term revenue growth, which is a way of saying that it wants to prioritize real implementations over science projects.”
Sustained interest in AI transformation would be a boon for channel partners that are up for the challenge. A recent study by Omdia, a Channel Dive sister company, suggests that vendor support for AI adoption is crucial. Fewer than one-fifth of partners surveyed felt ready to succeed in AI.
“Partners who position themselves as strategic advisors will win in the AI era,” Omdia Senior Director of Channels Rachel Brindley told Channel Dive. “The key role will be to create customer value above the model layer and help customers transform their workloads and best practices.”
Anthropic and now OpenAI have both signaled a willingness to help channel partners provide adoption assistance as in the battle for enterprise dominance. Currently, there’s not much of a market gap separating the two AI behemoths, Alex Smith, VP of channels research and practice operations at the Futurum Group, told Channel Dive.
”OpenAI was the first to kick-start this industry as we see it today,” Smith said in an email. “But Anthropic is rapidly closing ground in the enterprise space. OpenAI needs to shore up a partner ecosystem if it's going to win outright.”
Futurum group data shows that Athropic more than doubled its enterprise footprint in the last year but has yet to surpass OpenAI. An analysis by Ramp found Anthropic inching ahead of OpenAI among business users in April.
