OpenAI is ramping up its aggressive expansion into the enterprise market.
OpenAI on Monday announced the creation of an independent company, OpenAI Deployment Company, “aimed at helping organizations build and deploy AI systems.”
OpenAI and 19 other companies, including Goldman Sachs, Brookfield, and Bain Capital, have partnered to form the new company. The implementing company will launch with an initial investment of over $4 billion at a pre-money valuation of $10 billion.
As part of the announcement, OpenAI announced it has acquired applied AI consulting and engineering firm Tomoro, which will equip the new OpenAI company with a base of approximately 150 Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). Popularized by Palantir, FDE has become one of the most sought-after jobs in the AI economy as large enterprises push for AI tools customized to their needs.
Here’s what AI and technology experts are saying about this new venture.
Box CEO Aaron Levy Bloomberg/Getty Images
Aaron Levy, Box CEO
Box CEO Aaron Levie said there is currently a huge need for services and forward-deployed engineers.
“Making this all happen requires a tremendous amount of technical and domain-specific process work,” Levie wrote about X, commenting on the OpenAI announcement. “There is a huge opportunity for new service providers and internal teams and roles to emerge to drive this change.”
Levie emphasized that any changes that businesses need to make to meet the demands of the age of agentic AI are “not technically trivial.”
“First, we need to modernize our infrastructure and data and make sure our agents are available. Access controls, entitlements, and permissions need to be mapped in a way that works for agents and people. “You need to make sure you have a consistent inventory of your customers. You need to consistently evaluate and maintain your agents when there are model upgrades. You also need to drive change management of the process itself to understand what parts people do and what parts agents do.”
This announcement caught the attention of Nvidia’s vice president. Gina Hsu/Shutterstock
Sunny Madra, Vice President of Hardware, Nvidia
Nvidia Vice President Sunny Madra says, “Services and solutions are the key to winning the hearts and minds of enterprises.”
Yan-David “Yanda” Erlich, B Capital General Partner
B Capital general partner Jan-David “Yanda” Erlich said “very few” companies are ready to absorb advances in AI models.
“@OpenAI Deployment Company is designed to help bridge the gap between frontier capabilities and real-world implementation,” Erlich wrote about X.
Ehrlich also emphasized the company’s role in OpenAI’s new venture. (B Capital, which has a strategic partnership with Boston Consulting Group, is a founding partner of OpenAI Deployment Company.)
Dean W. Ball, Senior Fellow, American Innovation Foundation
Dean W. Ball, a senior fellow at the American Innovation Foundation, openly questioned what DevCo would mean for the future of robotics.
“As robotics becomes a ‘reality’ in many novel industrial environments, I wonder if efforts like the one below will morph into early 20th century industrial finance companies, financial products offered to companies to tap into the technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution,” Ball wrote in X.
Carolina Milanesi, Technology Analyst and President of Creative Solutions
Carolina Milanesi, a longtime technology analyst, wondered why Microsoft wasn’t interested in services.
“Microsoft has coined the term “frontier company,” but has shown no interest in the service layer that will get companies there,” Milanesi wrote in X. “Their biggest AI partners are just stepping into that gap, with 150 FDEs on the cap table: DeployCo, Tomoro, McKinsey, Bain, Capgemini.”
Matthew Lam, Head of Handshake AI Strategy Project
Matthew Lam, strategic project leader at Handshake AI, focused on what OpenAI’s announcement means for the forward deployment engineer job market.
“The demand for forward-deployed engineers has increased significantly,” he wrote to X.