OpenAI COO says ‘we haven’t really seen AI enter business processes yet’

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a new platform called OpenAI Frontier for businesses to build and manage agents, but OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said businesses have yet to see high-level AI adoption.

“One of the interesting things and the inspiration for the work we’ve been doing lately at OpenAI Frontier is that we haven’t really seen the business process of AI yet,” the AI ​​executive said on the sidelines of the India AI conference held last week in New Delhi.

“You have really powerful AI systems that anyone can use in their capacity. And businesses are these very complex organizations with lots of people, teams, that all have to work together, lots of context. There are very complex goals that have to be accomplished using lots of different systems and tools.”

There is a lot of talk about AI agents taking over business processes and saying “SaaS is dead”. While these predictions have moved SaaS stocks at times, they haven’t really come true. In fact, Lightcap said OpenAI was the biggest user of Slack last year, which shows how much AI firms still rely on traditional business software.

In January, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar posted that the company’s revenue is increasing, and the beginning of the end of 2025 with more than 20 billion dollars a year. Lightcap said demand is strong, without sharing any numbers.

“We almost always find ourselves having to manage a lot of demand. We’re still a growing organization, so there’s this global demand factor that we’d like to be able to meet, and we’re working as hard as we can to meet that,” Lightcap said.

At the same time, OpenAI is thinking about how to measure success in business. Lightcap said OpenAI will try to measure Frontier’s impact based on “business outcomes, not seat licenses.” (The company hasn’t shared prices for Frontier.)

“Frontier is a way for us to repeatedly test how we can bring AI to messy and complex business environments that I think if we get it right, we’ll learn a lot about both business and AI systems,” Lightcap commented.

Days after the TechCrunch interview, OpenAI partnered with consultants such as Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini to bring its technology to the business push. Even competitor Anthropic has introduced plugins for finance, engineering, and business design to create Claude-based agents.

At the time, the company didn’t have a clear way to integrate OpenClaw’s recently acquired open source tool, but Lightcap said OpenAI offers a “vision of the future” where agents can do “almost anything you want to be able to do on a computer.”

In conjunction with the India AI conference, OpenAI has made several recent announcements about its business in the world’s largest market. The company said India is ChatGPT’s second largest user base outside the US, with more than 100 million weekly users. Lightcap said that voice as a process is growing in India and allowing OpenAI to reach more people.

“Voice is very important here. And the voice models now feel good enough and ready to run in low-latency and low-bandwidth areas, where you can start to enable access to technology to a group of people who may have been more disenfranchised than otherwise,” said Lightcap.

The company also signed a business contract for the use of its equipment and computer outsourcing. Lightcap noted that India ranks fourth in terms of business seats in Asia, the lowest in a country with a large population, and OpenAI has a lot of scope to expand here.

The AI ​​company is also expected to open two new offices in India in Mumbai and Bengaluru. However, these are likely to be sales and marketing offices. When I asked Lightcap if these offices would include technical talent, he said, “Never say no.”

There is also fear of the impact on jobs, especially in countries like India, where the IT services industry and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) are prominent, as AI tools automate some of the tasks. Over the past few weeks, Indian IT company shares have plunged as the market considers the fact that areas such as coding may need fewer people. Lightcap said the company is “backed” by what it sees about the job market.

“Our view is that over time, jobs will change. I think we don’t know yet where, how, or what, but it seems inevitable that work will look different in the future than it looks today. And that’s natural, that’s part of the business cycle. It’s part of the global and dynamic economy we live in. So I think what we have to do is be able to sympathize with the high level where it can change,”