OpenAI says it reached 1 million business users

Credit: VentureBeat made with OpenAI DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT Plus

OpenAI’s paid business offerings reached a milestone, reaching one million paying business users across ChatGPT Enterprise, Team and Edu offerings. 

The one million user mark significantly increased from the 600,000 the company posted in April this year. In January, OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap revealed ChatGPT Enterprise, the first of the business-focused subscription products from OpenAI to release, saw 150,000 users across 260 organizations. 

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise on August 28 last year and followed it up with ChatGPT Team in January this year and ChatGPT Edu in May. ChatGPT Enterprise gives companies access to its latest model (today, it’s GPT 4o), longer context windows, data analysis and customization. ChatGPT Team is a version of Enterprise that is built specifically for smaller groups within a company and small and medium businesses. ChatGPT Edu, targeted at teachers and students, offers many of the same benefits. 

Reaching one million users in a year, especially for paid products, is a feat. However, it should also be noted that regular, vanilla, free ChatGPT logged 200 million users as of August this year. 

OpenAI released these new business usage figures a day after rival Anthropic launched Claude Enterprise, its big business offering that provides a 500,000 token context window along with enterprise-grade security and control. 

Growth coming from other territories

In an email to VentureBeat, OpenAI said a big chunk of the growth comes from users outside of the U.S. and from large organizations. 

“More than half of Enterprise, Team and Edu seats are outside the U.S., with Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom as the top three non-U.S. countries,” the company said. “We’re seeing traction with the world’s most important companies and organizations, including Arizona State University, Moderna, Rakuten and Morgan Stanley.” 

OpenAI said API usage “has doubled since we launched GPT 4o mini in July.” This could indicate a rising interest in using smaller versions of large language models for specific tasks. OpenAI previously said that the multimodal GPT 4o mini “is the most cost-effective small model in the market.”

Productivity gains 

Along with seeing more users, OpenAI said it’s beginning to see how businesses are harnessing its subscription products in their work. 

OpenAI said a survey of 4,700 business users showed ChatGPT Enterprise, Team and Edu are contributing to a 92% increase in productivity. Respondents said the products are saving them time, with 88% saying it’s cut down on time and 75% reporting an improvement in creativity and innovation. 

The top use cases for businesses were research gathering, drafting and editing content and ideation.

Other similar surveys have found enterprises see productivity and revenue gains with generative AI platforms. Google Cloud said 74% of companies using at least one gen AI application saw a return on investment in a year, with 45% reporting productivity gains mainly in IT processes and staff productivity.