OpenAI Just Launched a Consulting Arm to Help Companies Deploy AI

OpenAI has launched the OpenAI Deployment Company, a new majority-owned subsidiary designed to embed specialized engineers directly inside enterprises working on complex, high-stakes AI projects. The company enters with more than $4 billion in initial investment—and a $10 billion valuation—backed by 19 firms including TPG, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company.

The model is borrowed directly from Palantir’s playbook: Forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, parachute into client organizations and live inside the complexity—legacy infrastructure, compliance constraints, convoluted permissions—rather than shipping software and leaving the implementation headache to someone else.

To staff the new entity from day one, OpenAI has agreed to acquire Tomoro, a U.K.-based applied AI consulting firm with deployments at Tesco, Virgin Atlantic, and Supercell, where its engineers built an in-game support agent serving 110 million users in 12 weeks. The acquisition brings roughly 150 engineers and deployment specialists. It is subject to regulatory approvals and expected to close in the coming months.

Days before OpenAI’s announcement, Anthropic revealed its own enterprise deployment venture—a $1.5 billion entity backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs—with essentially the same premise: embed engineers inside companies, redesign workflows around AI agents, build durable systems that don’t evaporate after the pilot phase.

The enterprise AI race is no longer primarily about benchmarks or model releases. It is about who owns the implementation layer, the deeply human work of getting AI into production inside organizations that weren’t built for it. Enterprise already accounts for more than 40% of OpenAI’s revenue, with the company reporting $25 billion in annualized revenue as of February, and enterprise on pace to reach parity with consumer revenue by end of 2026.

For every dollar companies spend on software, they spend roughly six on services. That ratio has made consulting a multitrillion-dollar industry for decades. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are now positioning to capture that spend, not by partnering with McKinsey and similar consulting firms, but by becoming a version of it.

OpenAI’s investment partners collectively sponsor more than 2,000 businesses globally, giving the Deployment Company a built-in distribution channel that bypasses the traditional CIO sales cycle entirely.

COO Brad Lightcap, who shifted to a special projects role in April, is overseeing the venture. Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who spent over a decade at Salesforce before running Slack, will lead commercial operations.

OpenAI’s enterprise market share has taken hits. Its API share reportedly dropped from around 50% in 2023 to roughly 25% by mid-2025, as Anthropic and Google made inroads. The Deployment Company is a structural response: Rather than competing on model benchmarks alone, OpenAI is building an implementation moat around its frontier models.

The AI giant projects reaching $85 billion in revenue by 2030—a number that requires agents to become the default operating layer for enterprise, not just a productivity feature. The Deployment Company is its most direct bet yet that it can make that happen on its own terms, not just through APIs and subscriptions.