ChatGPT has revolutionized how most people see and interact with AI, from creating trip plans to helping engineers code. OpenAI, its inventor, claimed on Wednesday that it had recruited a significant corporate client as an indication of a similar influence in the workplace.
The management consulting firm PwC will be OpenAI’s largest client, encompassing 100,000 users. The consulting firm will be OpenAI’s initial partner in providing enterprise products to other organizations.
After raising billions, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT’s business tier in August 2023 to monetize its generative AI products. The corporate tier allows for quicker, limitless interactions and greater flexibility in customizing models for a variety of use cases. More analytics and tools are included. 
As with any enterprise software, OpenAI must persuade enterprises to see its generative AI solutions as a substantial IT, business process, and personnel investment rather than a pilot.
OpenAI and PWC
“PWC is the first partner we are leaning into in this way,” said OpenAI’s global director of alliances and partnerships, Richard Hasslacher, in an interview. PwC, our biggest client, is also our first partner to resell ChatGPT Enterprise. The company is expanding into industrial verticals and providing a growing range of services that consumers urgently need in a new solution category.
OpenAI said last month that ChatGPT’s corporate tier has 600,000 users, including 93% of Fortune 500 organisations, according to Hasslacher. He wouldn’t say how long that user base spends engaging.
PwC’s 100,000 U.S., U.K., and Middle Eastern personnel would expand that figure significantly. The implementation of ChatGPT globally by the company could potentially impact 328,000 workers.
The transaction demonstrates how PwC sees its company developing as well as the next large growth opportunity for its consultancy division.
Bret Greenstein, a PwC partner and “generative AI leader,” denied that ChatGPT or any other generative AI assistant would harm employment. Instead, it may allow the organization to grow without adding employees.
“This is very important for us,” added Greenstein. He stated that the company was an early ChatGPT user and should move up to enterprise as it engages more.
As the technological stack improves, PwC may purchase rather than create additional tools for the offering. We can then concentrate on results, transformation, workflow, use cases, and business processes rather than API assembly to design an employee experience, he added.
Whether generative AI is hype or whether these services will be used has been a major debate. Greenstein refused to reveal how many GenAI products PwC uses every day, but said its training tools had 90% engagement.
More crucially, generative AI might open up new economic opportunities for consulting organisations like PwC, which has long promoted “digital transformation,” a prominent IT subject.
He stated that they were reselling because their customers were experiencing the same thing.
ChatGPT’s self-service version costs $30 per user, and the consumer edition costs $20. PwC and OpenAI have not disclosed the enterprise pricing for this story. This Reddit discussion suggests $60 per seat, every month, for 150 seats for a year. Doing the math for 100,000 users yields a fairly large figure; thus, I think these rates vary greatly.
OpenAI will continue to collaborate with corporations, but it is introducing this channel approach.
“Today, we have our own customer success team that will support our customers in deploying their GenAI solutions,” stated Hasslacher. But we have limited capacity, so the partner ecosystem is crucial.” He added, “I think you will be seeing a lot more related to that ecosystem” now that PwC is its reselling partner.
