“AI is increasingly able to do meaningful work within organizations,” said Dennis Dresser, chief revenue officer at OpenAI.
OpenAI has unveiled its own artificial intelligence services company backed by an initial investment of more than $4 billion, following a similar announcement by AI rival Anthropic, with both vendors investing in channel partner programs.
OpenAI said in a statement Monday that building the foundation for the services company, named OpenAI Deployment Co., is pending its acquisition of London-based applied AI consulting and engineering firm Tomor. More acquisitions are planned. Financial terms of the Tomoro acquisition were not disclosed.
Investors in the new company include Capgemini No. Ranked #4 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500. Also receiving awards were fellow consulting and systems integration giants Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co..
“AI is increasingly capable of doing meaningful work within organizations,” Dennis Dresser, chief revenue officer at San Francisco-based OpenAI, said in a statement Monday. “The challenge now is to help enterprises integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that drive their business. DeployCo is designed to help organizations close that gap and turn AI capabilities into real operational impact.”
[RELATED: Anthropic Forms AI Services Company Amid Claude Partner Network Push]
OpenAI launches $4 billion AI services venture ‘DeployCo’
CRN has reached out to OpenAI, Bain, and Capgemini for comment.
OpenAI and Anthropic are working to grow their partner ecosystem this year. OpenAI has hired Colleen Kapase, who has overseen aggressive channel pricing at Google Cloud and Snowflake, to the top channel post. And Anthropic recently announced the Claude Partner Network with an initial investment of $100 million and a new certification program.
At the same time that these AI giants are investing in this channel, competition is emerging between traditional solution providers and emerging AI solution providers.
Traditional solution providers told CRN in recent interviews that they are delivering better and more secure AI outcomes to their customers by gaining a deeper understanding of business processes and workflows that have been built over years and even decades.
Russell Goodenough is senior vice president and head of AI for the UK and Australia at Montreal-based CGI. The CRN 2025 Solution Provider 500, a partner with Anthropic and OpenAI, told CRN in an interview that unlike these native AI solution providers, CGI brings reliability and security, with large enterprises and back-office operations relying on AI at scale. Not to mention avoiding vendor lock-in and expensive and inefficient migrations based on the customer’s existing IT assets.
CGI hopes to beat out AI-born startup solution providers in some of the biggest use cases for workplace AI, such as leveraging AI in the latest versions of complex enterprise resource planning systems.
“We want to be the first organization to try that kind of alternative to ERP,” Goodenough said. “We want to be the first organization to not only practice at hackathons, but to prove that we can do it in a reliable and trustworthy way.”
Additionally, the demand for workplace AI is so great that traditional solution providers and startups can carve out their own space in the market, Goodenough said.
AI-born solution provider startups are positioning themselves as being able to move more quickly than traditional service providers and having an employee base that is more versed in emerging technologies.
This year, vendor-led companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as smaller AI-born solution providers, are attracting investor attention. For example, Treeline recently acquired Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm renowned for its AI-powered services strategy, and completed a $25 million Series A round led by a16z.
“We’re building something very unique very quickly,” Treeline CEO Peter Doyle told CRN in an interview after the Series A announcement.
How OpenAI’s DeployCo works with enterprises
A new OpenAI services company aims to help customers build and deploy AI systems in the workplace. DeployCo will work to bring forward deployment engineers (FDEs) into the organization who specialize in frontier AI deployments to apply AI to complex problems in demanding environments, the vendor announced Monday.
OpenAI has committed that DeployCo will collaborate with the Frontier Alliance partner ecosystem and the broader consulting industry for AI deployment and change management.
These engineers work with customers’ business leaders, operators, and frontline teams to identify the areas where AI can deliver the greatest results. We also redesign organizational infrastructure and critical workflows to build durable systems.
Who is backing OpenAI’s DeployCo: TPG, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs
According to OpenAI, DeployCo is comprised of OpenAI and 19 investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators. TPG is a partnership-driven investment firm. Advent, Brookfield and Bain’s investment arm are founding partners of the joint lead managers. B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus, and WCAS are DeployCo’s founding partners.
Notably, Goldman Sachs is also backing Anthropic’s services company.
Brookfield disclosed Monday that it is investing $500 million in DeployCo. Anuj Ranjan, CEO of Brookfield’s private equity business, said in a statement on Monday that the company is already seeing productivity gains from AI applications across its portfolio and is investing in DeployCo to further expand its AI adoption.
“Artificial intelligence will be a decisive driver of productivity across the backbone of the global economy,” Ranjan said.
OpenAI says DeployCo’s private equity sponsors can leverage portfolio companies for early AI transformation use cases.
“AI-driven enterprise transformation represents one of the most attractive growth opportunities in technology today, driven by rapid advances in LLM and increased demand by organizations for tools that integrate AI into core systems and workflows,” TPG CEO Jon Winkelried said in a statement Monday. “DeployCo is addressing this need at scale and we are proud to partner with OpenAI to unlock the full value of AI.”
DeployCo is an independent business unit of which OpenAI is the majority owner and manager. According to the vendor, DeployCo operates as an extension of OpenAI, keeping customers closely connected to research, product, and internal deployment teams. DeployCo engineers get a roadmap for future OpenAI capabilities through models, tools, and deployment patterns.
The initial investment of $4 billion will be used to expand the business and acquire more companies beyond Tomoro. The planned acquisition, Tomoro consulting firm OpenAI, will bring approximately 150 FDEs and implementation specialists to DeployCo. Tomoro’s customers include Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Supercell. OpenAI plans to complete the acquisition “in the coming months.”
In Tomoro’s own announcement about the acquisition on Monday, the solutions provider said joining OpenAI increases its ambitions to help organizations transition from OpenAI access to production-ready AI deployments.
“As part of the Deployment Company, we will be able to do this on a larger canvas,” according to the announcement.
According to his LinkedIn account, Tomor director Ash Garner co-founded Tomor in 2023 after working at Accenture and Mudano for about five years. Accenture acquired Mudano in 2020. Mr. Garner left Accenture with the title of European Banking Industry Generative AI Lead.
DeployCo’s work with clients begins with AI diagnostics, a few prioritized workflows to find the greatest possible outcomes, and then moves to design, build, test, and deploy production systems.
According to the vendor, these systems connect OpenAI models to customer data, tools, controls and business processes.
In OpenAI’s DeployCo announcement, the vendor revealed that more than 1 million enterprises have adopted OpenAI’s products and application programming interfaces (APIs).
OpenAI says DeployCo’s investment and consulting partners support more than 2,000 companies worldwide. Consulting and integrator partners add “thousands more” to that number.
Earlier this month, Anthropic revealed plans to launch its own AI services company while continuing to invest in solution providers. San Francisco-based Claude Maker is creating this AI services company to work with mid-sized customers in a variety of industries to bring AI tools to their operations. Anthropic is forming a new company with financial giants Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, and is backed by a consortium of alternative asset managers.
Multiple media outlets reported that the new company would inject a total of approximately $1.5 billion in funding. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman will each invest approximately $300 million. Goldman Sachs will invest approximately $150 million.
