Nearly 70-79 percent of enterprise customers of OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT are coming from its Azure-OpenAI partnership and not directly from GPT-4 or its other channels, according to UnearthInsight’s estimates sourced by Moneycontrol. In less than four months of its launch, ChatGPT Enterprise has clocked in 22,000-25,000 customers globally.
ChatGPT Enterprise was launched on August 28, 2023, targeting large businesses to offer more security, privacy and high-speed access to OpenAI’s technology.
Analysts, however, remain sceptical of giving a verdict on its adoption yet, saying most of the customers are still exploring the technology at the proof-of-concept (PoC) stages and the real picture will only show once it completes a year, and one gets to see their yearly subscription renewal numbers.
At present, around 18,000 of the overall Enterprise customers are coming through the Azure-OpenAI partnership.
“Everybody is already using Microsoft, it makes it convenient to use OpenAI in co-pilot. It’s a partnership approach and the numbers would easily come in because Microsoft already has millions of customers. This got OpenAI users much faster,” Gaurav Vasu, founder and CEO of market intelligence firm UnearthInsight told Moneycontrol.
He added that it won’t be a surprise if Microsoft’s partnership ends up accounting for nearly 90 percent of OpenAI’s customers in the long run.
“Microsoft also wants it that way. If most ChatGPT customers come through their route, it is easier to integrate their own products and build additional ancillary products and features around it,” he added.
According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and CEO of enterprise IT research and advisory firm Greyhound Research, there’s going to be a huge difference in active users of the enterprise chatbot versus the install base. He said that the actual on-premise deployment of the technology at this stage would only be around 20 percent of the overall customers added.
“Around 80 percent of the adoption will be for PoCs, just testing and trying; only the remaining 20 percent would be actively using it on premises. This is because there are serious privacy, compliance and intellectual property issues that can arise out of the usage of ChatGPT. I am not saying ChatGPT hasn’t thought through this but there is a complete lack of enterprise readiness to deploy this tool throughout the enterprises,” he told Moneycontrol.
He added, “Even if ChatGPT Enterprise is paid, customers would have paid it for PoC work and not necessarily it has gone into actual deployment. The other major numbers to check would be monthly active users and yearly renewal of subscriptions.”
Also read: Hits and misses: How ChatGPT’s first year to lure enterprise customers went
India adoption numbers
Closer home, in India, only about 55-75 listed companies but over 300 startups have joined ChatGPT Enterprise, as per UnearthInsight’s estimates.
Geographically, over 80 percent of enterprise adoption comes from the US followed by the UK at 5 percent while France, Brazil, Denmark and Japan account for 2-3 percent of enterprise clients for ChatGPT or GPT-4.
In terms of sector-wise adoption globally, 40-45 percent of enterprise customers belong to Consulting/Professionals Services/Research/Data firms followed by BFSI/Fintech at 18-20 percent and Education/Edtech at 12-15 percent.
Interestingly, in the past four-five months, ChatGPT’s monthly website visits have started to stabilise at around 1.5 billion, after touching a peak of 1.9 billion. The average time spent on using ChatGPT per user per visit too has gone down from 8.7 minutes in March 2023 to 6 minutes in November 2023.
According to Vasu, this is because the backend database of ChatGPT as well as user prompts have improved over time, which has led to less time being spent per visit.
Speaking about the stagnant monthly visit numbers, Vasu said, “There are 7-8 billion people on the planet, even at 1.5 billion monthly website visits it is a huge number. Even 1 billion would be a huge number for a company. But the initial hype has died down, so even if they are able to sustain a 1 billion number, that will be huge.”
Impact of OpenAI debacle
ChatGPT recently completed a year of its launch, and the year ended in a series of high-profile board room dramas, which involved co-founder and CEO Sam Altman getting ousted, him joining Microsoft and then being back again at the helm of OpenAI – all in a span of a few days.
While the issue did get resolved and everything came back to square one albeit with a newly appointed board, it left several enterprise customers worried. Currently, some of GPT-4’s enterprise customers include Morgan Stanley, PwC, Citibank, Shopify, Koo, Snap Inc, Slack, Coca-Cola and Bain & Company, to name a few.
Gogia said the recent developments have made enterprises question whether they should trust a startup easily as data security too will be at stake. What got OpenAI customers quickly was Microsoft’s alignment and brand trust, he said.
However, this partnership also makes Microsoft too dependent on ChatGPT for its generative AI bets, while rivals like IBM and Amazon are focused on building in-house B2B enterprise-grade generative AI.
“What happened at OpenAI recently has raised serious question marks on whether enterprises should rely on startups. And the biggest gainer of this has been IBM, the second biggest winner is Google and third would be Amazon on enterprise-grade AI,” he said.
Also read: Meta and IBM form 'AI Alliance' to promote open-source development
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