Artificial intelligence startups OpenAI and Anthropic have their sights set on enterprise customers this year as they race to win more revenue, users and market share.
In separate interviews with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar highlighted enterprise as a key revenue driver for their businesses.
Enterprise customers account for roughly 40% of OpenAI’s business as of January, but Friar said she expects that figure to grow to closer to 50% by the end of the year. OpenAI announced in November that more than 1 million business customers around the world are using the company’s technology.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit AI lab in 2015, and its valuation has swelled to $500 billion since the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022.
“We’re an incredibly strong business today,” Friar said Wednesday. “As we look forward, for us, it’s eyes on the prize of, ‘How do we add value to the consumer? How do we add value to enterprises? And how do we close this capability gap?’ You’re going to hear us talk about this over and over again.”
Amodei said that while Anthropic offers consumer products, they are not the company’s major focus.
He attributed roughly 80% of Anthropic’s business to enterprises and 20% to consumers, adding that the startup has embraced enterprises in part because they are a relatively predictable and stable source of income.
“Since the beginning, Anthropic has thought in terms of safety and reliability of AI systems, and one of the things we realized is that that was very synergistic with working with enterprises as compared to consumers,” Amodei said.
As of September, Anthropic had amassed more than 300,000 business customers, up from less than 1,000 two years prior.
Anthropic was founded by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers in 2021, and its valuation has since climbed to $350 billion.
WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei