OpenAI has just launched a consulting arm to help companies deploy AI

Launched OpenAI OpenAI Publishing Companya new majority-owned subsidiary designed to embed dedicated engineers directly within organizations working on complex, high-risk AI projects. The company enters with a seed investment of more than $4 billion — and a $10 billion valuation — with backing from 19 firms including TPG, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Capgemini and McKinsey & Company.

The model is borrowed directly from Palantir’s playbook: Forward Deployed Engineers, or FDEs, parachute into customer organizations and live within the complexity — legacy infrastructure, compliance constraints, complex permissions — rather than shipping software and leaving the implementation headache to someone else.

To staff the new entity from day one, OpenAI agreed to the acquisition Tomorrowa UK-based AI application consultancy with deployments at Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Supercell, where its engineers built an in-game support agent serving 110 million users in 12 weeks. The acquisition brings in approximately 150 engineers and publishing professionals. It is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the coming months.

Days before the OpenAI announcement, Anthropy open Its Enterprise Deployment Project — a $1.5 billion entity backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs — is based on essentially the same premise: embed engineers inside companies, redesign workflows around AI agents, and build durable systems that don’t evaporate after the pilot phase.

The enterprise AI race is no longer primarily about standards or model releases. It’s about who owns the implementation layer, the deep human work of bringing AI into production within organizations that weren’t built for it. The Foundation already represents more than 40% of OpenAI revenueThe company reported annual revenues of $25 billion as of February, and the organization is on pace to reach parity with consumer revenues by the end of 2026.

For every dollar companies spend on software, they spend nearly six dollars on services. This ratio has made consulting a multi-trillion dollar industry for decades. Now OpenAI and Anthropic are in a position to capture that spending, not by partnering with McKinsey and similar consulting firms, but by becoming a version of it.

OpenAI’s investment partners collectively sponsor more than 2,000 companies globally, giving the publishing company a built-in distribution channel that bypasses the entire traditional IT manager’s sales cycle.

Executive Director of Operations Brad Lightcap, who moved to a special projects role in April, is overseeing the project. Chief Revenue Officer Dennis Dresser, who spent more than a decade at Salesforce before running Slack, will lead business operations.

OpenAI’s enterprise market share has been very successful. Share its API It is said It fell from about 50% in 2023 to nearly 25% by mid-2025, with Anthropic and Google taking off. The publishing company is a structural response: Rather than competing on model standards alone, OpenAI is building an implementation moat around its frontier models.

The AI ​​giant expects its revenue to reach $85 billion by 2030, a number that requires agents to become the default operating layer of an organization, not just a productivity feature. The publishing company is its most direct bet yet that it can achieve this on its own terms, not just through APIs and subscriptions.