Big bets: OpenAI nabbing Microsoft customers, fuelling partners' rivalry

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By Brody Ford & Shirin Ghaffary

 

Last spring, drugmaker Amgen Inc. announced plans to buy  Microsoft Corp’s Copilot AI assistant for 20,000 employees. It was a timely endorsement of the software company’s multibillion-dollar  bet on generative artificial intelligence, and Microsoft touted its new Copilot customer in three separate case studies.

 

Thirteen months later, Amgen employees are using a rival product: OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

 

Amgen expanded its use of ChatGPT earlier this year  after seeing the technology improve and hearing from employees that it helped with such tasks as research and summarizing scientific documents.

 

“OpenAI has done a tremendous job making their product fun to use,” said Senior Vice President Sean Bruich. Copilot is still a “pretty important tool,” he added, but more so for use with Microsoft products such as Outlook or Teams.

 

OpenAI’s nascent strength in the enterprise market is giving its partner and biggest investor indigestion. Microsoft salespeople describe being caught flatfooted at a time when they’re under pressure to get Copilot into as many customers’ hands as possible. The behind-the-scenes dogfight is complicating an already fraught relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI.  Since investing almost $14 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft has backed rival AI startups, started building its own AI models and is balking at signing off on its partner’s restructuring plan.  

 

OpenAI has inked deals with rival cloud computing partners and spent much of the past two years building out a suite of paid subscription products for businesses, schools and individuals. The startup recently agreed to acquire AI coding assistant Windsurf, which competes with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot.

 

It’s unclear whether OpenAI’s momentum with corporations will continue, but the company recently said it has 3 million paying business users, a 50 per cent jump from just a few months earlier.  A Microsoft spokesperson said Copilot is used by 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 and paid users have tripled compared with this time last year.

 

Gartner analyst Jason Wong said many companies are still testing Copilot with relatively few employees, leaving room for various software vendors to win customers. But for now, he said, it’s “kind of a showdown” between OpenAI and Microsoft. This story is based on conversations with more than two dozen customers and salespeople, many of them Microsoft employees. Most of these people asked not to be named in order to speak candidly about the competition between Microsoft and OpenAI. 

 

Both companies are essentially pitching the same thing: AI assistants that can handle onerous tasks — researching and writing; analysing data — potentially letting office workers focus on thornier challenges. Since both chatbots are largely based on the same OpenAI models, Microsoft’s salesforce has struggled to differentiate Copilot from the much better-known ChatGPT, according to people familiar with the situation. Asked about ChatGPT’s traction, Microsoft’s chief of workplace AI initiatives, Jared Spataro, said “awareness in the consumer space doesn’t necessarily translate into fit for use in the commercial space.” 

 

Microsoft’s “sweet spot,” he added, is taking the best technology available and fine-tuning it for business use. An OpenAI spokesperson said his company is benefiting from customers’ desire for direct access to the latest expertise and technology. Microsoft’s ubiquity should theoretically give it an advantage.  The Windows operating system dominates the workplace, and the firm is baking AI into the world’s most widely used suite of productivity apps. 

Big bets 

• OpenAI’s nascent strength in the enterprise market is giving its partner and biggest investor indigestion
• Microsoft salespeople describe being caught flatfooted at a time when they’re under pressure to get copilot into as many customers’ hands as possible
• The behind-the-scenes dogfight is complicating an already fraught relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI
• Since investing almost $14 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft has backed rival AI startups, started building its own AI models