It turns out that the oldest question in business: Who is the customer? OpenAI still can’t answer it.
Aside from that, many OpenAI makes most of its revenue from consumers, a question raised by an 11,000-word New Yorker article. In business terms, it is a B2C company. Anthropic primarily sells to large corporations. It’s B2B. OpenAI’s Codex tool and Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad show that each has ambitions for the other, but this is hard-coded DNA, a distinction reinforced by comments from both companies this week. Anthropic announced Monday that it has doubled its base of customers who spend $1 million a year. Meanwhile, OpenAI said it is “focused on building products that people love.”
So who wins?
Direct-to-consumer business models dominated the 2000s and early 2010s, as mobile and e-commerce opened up new sales channels. The last 10 years have been in the B2B model.
I’d bet on the latter. Consumer models can mint giant companies, but they tend to produce one winner and a graveyard of similar runs, like Google vs. Bing, Facebook vs. Friendster. There is room for many winners in the corporate world. (Enterprise software is currently in trouble, not because businesses no longer need it, but because it can become vibe-coded.) Even Uber, which has become a household verb, now sees its future in the service of corporate robotaxi vehicles.
That’s one reason why OpenAI looks weak at the moment. A model that everyone uses only works if everyone uses it. To do that, everyone has to trust them, and to do that, they have to trust Sam Altman, which goes back to the New Yorker article.
But there’s also a third path, and that’s OpenAI’s biggest claim. We call it B2C2B. Make your company ubiquitous and user-friendly. have Because employees are using it anyway, so they buy the product. While Microsoft started as a consumer business, IBM was a 1970s corporate giant, Steve Ballmer recalled last year, until enough users fell in love with its software that companies were forced to buy it wholesale. Altman’s strategy is to become the digital backbone of the office.
