OpenAI is upping its aggressive push into the enterprise market.
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On Monday, OpenAI announced the creation of stand-alone company, OpenAI Deployment Company, that it said is “designed to help organizations build and deploy AI systems.”
OpenAI and 19 other companies, including Goldman Sachs, Brookfield, and Bain Capital, partnered to create the new firm. The deployment company will launch with an initial investment of more than $4 billion at a $10 billion pre-money valuation.
As part of the announcement, OpenAI said it had acquired Tomoro, an applied AI consulting and engineering firm, which will give the new OpenAI firm a foundation of roughly 150 Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). Popularized by Palantir, FDEs have become one of the hottest jobs in the AI economy, as big companies push for AI tools specifically tailored to their needs.
Here is what AI and tech experts are saying about the new venture.
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Aaron Levie, CEO of Box
Box CEO Aaron Levie said there is a big need for services and forward-deployed engineers right now.
“That’s an insane amount of technical and domain-specific process work to be done to make this all happen,” Levie wrote on X, commenting on OpenAI’s announcement. “Huge opportunity for new service providers, as well as internally teams and roles to emerge, to help drive this change.”
Levie stressed that none of the changes required for businesses to meet the demands of the agentic AI moment “is easy technically.”
“You need to first modernize your infrastructure and data and make sure it’s ready for agents; access controls, entitlements, and permissions need to be mapped in a way that works for agents and people,” he wrote, “You need to make sure agents have the right context to work with; you need to consistently eval and maintain the agents when there are model upgrades; and you need to drive the change management of the process itself to figure out which parts the people do and what agents do.”
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Sunny Madra, Vice President of Hardware at Nvidia
Sunny Madra, an Nvidia VP, said, “Services and solutions are the key to winning the hearts of enterprises.”
Yan-David “Yanda” Erlich, General Partner at B Capital
Yan-David “Yanda” Erlich, a general partner at B Capital, said “few enterprises” are ready to absorb the advancements in AI models.
“The @OpenAI Deployment Company is designed to help close the gap between frontier capability and real-world implementation,” Erlich wrote on X.
Erlich also touted the firm’s role in OpenAI’s new venture. (B Capital, which has a strategic partnership with Boston Consulting Group, is a founding partner for the OpenAI Deployment Company.)
Dean W. Ball, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation
Dean W. Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, openly wondered about what DevCo will mean for the future of robotics.
“When robotics becomes ‘real’ in many novel industrial settings, I wonder if efforts like the one below will morph into the industrial loan companies of the early 20th century; financial products offered to firms to get in on the technologies of the second Industrial Revolution,” Ball wrote on X.
Carolina Milanesi, tech analyst and President of Creative Solutions
Carolina Milanesi, a longtime tech analyst, questioned why Microsoft isn’t showing interest in the services space.
“Microsoft coined frontier firm but shows no appetite for the services layer that gets companies there,” Milanesi wrote on X. “Their biggest AI partner just stepped into that gap. DeployCo, 150 FDEs from Tomoro, McKinsey, Bain and Capgemini on the cap table.”
Matthew Lam, Strategic Projects Lead at Handshake AI
Matthew Lam, strategic projects lead at Handshake AI, homed in on what OpenAI’s announcement means for the job market for forward-deployed engineers.
“Forward deployed engineers increasing in demand majorly,” he wrote on X.
