• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 11 hours ago

OpenAI has been in advanced discussions with private-equity firms to form a joint venture that should allow the company to grow adoption of its artificial intelligence (AI) software.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI CEO of applications, in a post on X today described the new venture as “building a deployment arm” for its technology, after Reuters broke the news. She did not comment on the participants, financing and valuation, but the strategy is meant to offset rising AI support and system costs.

"Companies have a ton of urgency to deploy AI in their organizations and we’re sprinting to meet that demand," Simo wrote. She threw out adoption rates for many of OpenAI products like more than one million businesses running on all its products combined.

Frontier Alliance, which launched last month to help enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents, has more demand than OpenAI can handle. Codex is now at more than 2 million weekly active users, up nearly 4x since the start of the year. API use jumped 20% in the week after GPT-5.4 launched.

OpenAI also will launch a dedicated deployment arm to embed Forward Deployed Engineers inside of enterprises, sort of like a programmer working on consignment. This project has been in the works with OpenAI investor and alliance partners since last December.

I believe the industry could see a similar project from OpenAI that looks similar to an ad agency if it continues to push for advertising in ChatGPT.

Anthropic also has been in talks with private-equity firms, including Blackstone, according to Bloomberg. The task is focused on forming a joint venture to sell Claude AI software to businesses, 

Despite all the private equity hoopla, OpenAI continues to test ChatGPT ads. Ashley Fletcher, CMO at Adthena, published numbers from ChatGPT Ads trial that the company has done with brands during the past couple of weeks.

He wrote in a LinkedIn post that click-through rates on "one batch of impressions came in at just 0.92%, a direct comparison to a search group of that theme in Google would be 6% from our analysis," and "one advertiser still only [sees] 3% spend of their allocated $250,000."

Advertisers have experienced some frustration over the inability to trigger their own ads in the trial, so Adthena is working with them to provide very early visibility on performance.

Adthena is working with about 50 advertisers, overall, and the ads often still trigger on first prompt, ranging in layout, across 40,000 daily prompts indexed.

The good news for advertisers, from Fletcher's statement, is that advertisements would appear immediately after a user's initial query, rather than waiting for a follow-up interaction or questions. This suggests that the AI is confident in identifying immediate intent to make a purchase or continue the research.

The joint venture would have a pre-money valuation of roughly $10 billion, with private equity investors committing about $4 billion.

OpenAI and its rivals are pushing to convince business professionals to pay for their services to offset the cost of developing AI systems and support their valuations.