OpenAI, the US-based artificial-intelligence (AI) research firm, has fired its latest salvo towards seeking to monetize its widely popular chatbot, ChatGPT, by launching ChatGPT Enterprise. Through the latter, OpenAI seeks to address one key concern that enterprises and analysts have raised over time—that of ChatGPT using business data to train their large language models (LLMs).
“We’re launching ChatGPT Enterprise, which offers enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows for processing longer inputs, advanced data analysis capabilities, customization options, and much more,” OpenAI said in a blog post on 28 August.
The launch of the enterprise tier of the popular chatbot, backed by OpenAI’s latest generation LLM, GPT-4, comes after multiple major tech firms worldwide banned the use of the tool, citing concerns around data privacy and security. In May, for instance, various reports claimed both Apple Inc. and Samsung, two of the world’s largest tech firms, had banned the internal use of the chatbot due to concerns regarding handling of sensitive internal company data.
It is this that OpenAI seeks to answer, with its blog post claiming US cosmetics group The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., Jack Dorsey-backed payments firm Block Inc., Australian design platform Canva and others among its first adopters.
Even though OpenAI did not divulge how much ChatGPT Enterprise would cost businesses, industry experts and stakeholders said the AI research firm could find strong monetization ground by offering it as a secure chatbot deployable immediately, hence taking on Microsoft Corp.’s offering of GPT-4 application programming interfaces (APIs) to businesses looking to build their own generative AI tech tools.
Jaspreet Bindra, founder of tech consultancy firm Tech Whisperer, said it will be “interesting to see how Microsoft and OpenAI manage to avoid stepping on each other’s toes now”.
The biggest significance of ChatGPT Enterprise, as a result, could be its credibility in offering security and privacy to businesses. Kashyap Kompella, chief executive of industry analyst firm RPA2AI Research, and visiting professor for AI at BITS School of Management, said ChatGPT Enterprise “is certified for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the US’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act on data privacy and protection”. “Indian companies could also satisfy themselves that the product similarly satisfies India’s new Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. OpenAI can certify its compliance with India’s data protection laws, which would satisfy Indian firms as well.”
This should help ChatGPT Enterprise serve a completely different market compared to GPT-4 plugins offered by Microsoft, through Azure OpenAI.
Jaya Kishore Reddy, the chief technology officer and co-founder of homegrown enterprise chatbot firm Yellow.ai, agreed, adding the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise may help OpenAI find “a more wide-ranging adoption, where enterprises might want to try out the service and operationalize it internally, before formalizing its adoption within their enterprise apps”.
The latter, Reddy said, is already available through Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which enterprises have started adopting.
As a result, the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise could help OpenAI monetize its largely expensive operation to run and maintain the application.
Monetizing ChatGPT will also be key for OpenAI to retain interest on the tool—data from analytics platform Similarweb, reported by Reuters in June, showed that ChatGPT mobile and desktop traffic dropped by 9.7% in June, from May. This shows that despite massive popularity, the tool isn’t infallible.
In India, though, the adoption story could be different. “GPT-4-based deployments are 15x more expensive than GPT-3.5. Enterprises among our clients as such are not very particular about what model is used in their chatbot deployments—they are more concerned about cost optimizations being done in their overall operations,” Yellow.ai’s Reddy said.
Kompella said monetization is “not yet commensurate with (ChatGPT’s) popularity, given the huge scale of investments required in building the technology.”
“Nearly 80% of Fortune 500 companies have experimented with ChatGPT in the form of pilots, but successful commercialization depends on those small pilot projects moving into large scale deployments. ChatGPT enterprise is a step in that direction,” he added.
Tech Whisperer’s Bindra said, “The lines between Microsoft and OpenAI’s offerings are blurring—the biggest difference between the two is Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise, delivered on cloud through the Azure OpenAI service, allows enterprises to fine-tune their enterprise chatbot deployments with their own internal datasets. OpenAI so far has not announced the ability to do that directly, with ChatGPT Enterprise. Further, while an entity like Microsoft will have a bigger liability legally and otherwise regarding enterprise security, OpenAI is also likely to offer agreements to enterprises who sign up for its platform—which should answer data security concerns. This will be good for OpenAI.”
Jim Hare, vice-president analyst for analytics and AI at Gartner, said OpenAI’s plugins “are useful for tech providers and enterprises who want to integrate GenAI models and ChatGPT into other applications.”
“Enterprises will want to use a pre-built tool like ChatGPT, rather than trying to build it themselves. I see APIs and ChatGPT Enterprise addressing two different market needs,” he added.
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