ChatGPT Enterprise - 7 Things to Know About OpenAI's Latest Product

The current and planned features signal OpenAI's market strategy

OpenAI today announced ChatGPT Enterprise, promising enterprise-grade security and privacy along with new features. The company revealed the original ChatGPT is widely used in large companies today, and some are already using the new product.

Since ChatGPT's launch just nine months ago, we’ve seen teams adopt it in over 80% of Fortune 500 companies.

We've heard from business leaders that they’d like a simple and safe way of deploying it in their organization. Early users of ChatGPT Enterprise—industry leaders like Block, Canva, Carlyle, The Estée Lauder Companies, PwC, and Zapier—are redefining how they operate and are using ChatGPT to craft clearer communications, accelerate coding tasks, rapidly explore answers to complex business questions, assist with creative work, and much more.

… (from the new product landing page)

Today marks another step towards an AI assistant for work that helps with any task, is customized for your organization, and that protects your company data.

Here are seven things that will get you up-to-speed on OpenAI’s latest market-disrupting move.

1. You Will Have to Wait for Access [and pricing] 💵

While OpenAI says that ChatGPT Enterprise is available today, that is only after you get a response from the sales team and they provide some path for you to sign up. You will also have to go through this step of registering interest to get any information about pricing. It is unclear how OpenAI is prioritizing follow-up, but a friendly email confirmation will tell you:

We are currently working through the high volume interest we’ve received in ChatGPT Enterprise. We are working to get back to companies as quickly as possible.

You can find the sign-up request form here. The list of customers on the ChatGPT Enterprise landing page is dominated by large companies. However, there are some smallish startups, such as Descript and Quizlet, on the list, so it may be that OpenAI plans to reach out to a mix of businesses.

Then again, the company also says there will be a self-service onboarding process for smaller businesses coming in the future. You may have to wait a while if you are not a corporate giant. More about that in section 7 of this article.

2. Enterprise-Class Security for ChatGPT 🔒

The most critical addition to ChatGPT Enterprise is new controls for privacy and security. A general lack of these features in the initial roll-out led several companies to ban ChatGPT use by employees. OpenAI says that the new privacy and security features include:

• Customer prompts and company data are not used to train OpenAI models

• Data encryption at rest and in transit

• SOC 2 certified compliance

These are requirements for many companies for any enterprise software purchase, which initially created an adoption barrier. Their addition should pave the way to wider market receptivity.

The absence of these features and those below was not particularly surprising. ChatGPT was initially conceived as a demonstration product and oriented toward consumer use. Its broad popularity placed OpenAI in an awkward situation where users assumed it was a mature product, but it didn’t have many of the features everyone expected and had considerable gaps for business use.

3. Enterprise-Class Management Tools 🎛

However, it was not just privacy and security improvements requested by interested companies. ChatGPT did not have the basic management tools that IT organizations require to manage a typical enterprise application. OpenAI announced new features today that include:

• Single Sign-On (SSO) support to enable users to use their primary work login credentials for ChatGPT

• Domain verification to ensure the model in use is the one provisioned by the company

• An admin console and features for “bulk member management,” enabling scalable group management instead of one employee at a time.

• Analytics for usage tracking

While the lack of security made ChatGPT adoption impossible for most enterprises to consider, the absence of management tools made it impractical. The current list of features might be considered a bare minimum. OpenAI will surely receive a long list of additional feature requests from its initial ChatGPT Enterprise customers. This list will expand by necessity.

4. A Better ChatGPT 💪

ChatGPT Enterprise also provides new features beyond the free and paid versions available today for consumers. These include new benefits related to usage, performance, and customization.

Usage

• Unlimited GPT-4 access

• Unlimited access to Code Interpreter (renamed advanced data analysis)

Performance / Capability

• Higher speed performance (“up to 2x faster”)

• 32k context window, which is 4x larger than the current GPT-4 through ChatGPT

Customization

• Shareable chat templates for your company to collaborate and build common workflows

• Free credits to use our APIs if you need to extend OpenAI into a fully custom solution for your org

The renaming of Code Interpreter is a sign that OpenAI expects the capabilities of this feature will soon extend beyond code. And the lower latency for GPT-4 will be necessary for many business tasks. GPT-3.5 and the Turbo model are blazingly fast, similar to what you find with Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity. However, GPT-4 requires more patience than the modern technology user expects. Four times faster would be preferred, but 2x faster is certainly a step in the right direction.

Also worth noting is the larger context window. The 4k (GPT-3.5) and 8k (standard GPT-4) data token context windows are too small for many summarization and analysis tasks common in enterprise settings. Anthropic has stood out with its 100k context window coupled with low latency. The 32k context window is less than one-third of Anthropic’s offering but should be sufficient for many if not most, use cases.

The shareable templates and API use credits are also a logical way to deepen enterprise use of OpenAI. A web app that answers questions and is untethered from internal business processes and systems is always at risk for replacement. The same web app incorporated into business processes and integrated into systems of record will raise switching costs and ensure long-term customer loyalty.

5. New Features are Coming 🎁

OpenAI also announced that several new ChatGPT Enterprise features are in the works. These include:

• Customization: Securely extend ChatGPT’s knowledge with your company data by connecting the applications you already use
  

• Availability for all team sizes: a self-serve ChatGPT Business offering for smaller teams
  

• Power tools: Even more powerful versions of Advanced Data Analysis and browsing that are optimized for work
  

• Solutions for your function: more tools for specific roles, such as data analysts, marketers, customer support and more

Connecting ChatGPT to a company’s knowledge base is the approach many are taking now with the GPT-3.5-turbo model. The customization feature listed above will presumably enable a similar set of capabilities that leverage GPT-4. Knowledge access is emerging as a killer app for businesses that have long struggled with easily accessing and extracting value from unstructured data.

The power tools for advanced data analysis and the solution by function indicate that OpenAI intends to further productize ChatGPT beyond a general capability to a Copilot for knowledge workers. This will put it in direct competition with Microsoft’s objectives around Office 365, but it is a savvy move.

Some enterprises do not use Microsoft’s productivity suite, so ChatGPT Enterprise is another way for the Microsoft/OpenAI team to gain entry. In addition, OpenAI will likely offer specialized ChatGPT tools that go beyond the functions that Microsoft supports today.

6. Setting the Market Context 📋

This move by OpenAI is setting market expectations for chat-style applications backed by large language models (LLM). And OpenAI is signaling that the company does not intend to leave ChatGPT as a general-purpose solution. The company sees an opportunity to provide “packages” or “modules” that will be more closely aligned with specific company roles.

Start-ups and existing software companies planning on an LLM-backed copilot for data science, accounting, production capacity planning, benefits planning, and so forth, may soon see a ChatGPT extension as their primary competitor. This would be similar to taking an internal search tool or messaging app (e.g., Slack) and turning it into an application for a variety of business professionals and processes.

It will be important to watch ChatGPT adoption closely and the specialized features that it introduces. If adoption is rapid and broad for the general-purpose solution, the new features will likely signal a reaction to market demand and what use cases are in most demand.

In addition, this will lead to a broader rise in specialized open-source LLM-backed applications as alternatives to the proprietary OpenAI offerings. This process is unlikely to play out as rapidly as ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 API adoption from the past nine months, but you should expect it to be much faster than most enterprise technology adoption patterns.

7. The Yammer Growth Model 🚀

When OpenAI announced it was working on a ChatGPT for business solution in April, I predicted it would employ a Yammer growth model. You may want to read the entire section from the original post on ChatGPT security (it’s in the fourth section), but here is an excerpt:

Yammer let anyone sign up for free with their company email address. Notably, they could do this without the approval or involvement of the IT department.

This created a viral effect, as users invited colleagues to join and formed user networks within their companies. Yammer then approached the IT leaders in these companies and showed them how many of their colleagues were using Yammer already. The sales representative then offered to provide paid premium features that enabled more control and visibility to the enterprise. Slack replicated this go-to-market model shortly after it launched in 2013.

OpenAI said in its announcement that it was being used in over 80% of Fortune 500 companies. The claim is substantiated by a footnote that says:

The 80% statistic refers to the percentage of Fortune 500 companies with registered ChatGPT accounts, as determined by accounts associated with corporate email domains.

You can look at this in two ways. The first is as a confirmation of ChatGPT being widely viewed as useful by employees of large companies. The second is a friendly warning to CIOs and risk managers: “Your employees are using ChatGPT today. We have the email addresses as evidence. Wouldn’t you prefer some oversight and control over that use?”

Oh, one more thing. Yammer was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. Feel free to make any connections you feel are appropriate. 😀

So, what do you think about ChatGPT Enterprise? What would entice you or your organization to adopt it? Let me know in the comments.