OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses

CNN  — 

OpenAI is releasing a version of its buzzy ChatGPT tool specifically for businesses, the company announced Monday, as an AI arms race continues to ramp up throughout corporate America.

OpenAI unveiled the new service, dubbed “ChatGPT Enterprise,” in a company blog post and said it will be available to business clients for purchase as of Monday. The new offering promises to provide “enterprise-grade security and privacy” combined with “the most powerful version of ChatGPT yet” for businesses looking to jump on the generative AI bandwagon.

“We believe AI can assist and elevate every aspect of our working lives and make teams more creative and productive,” the blog post said. “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.”

Some of the early customers of ChatGPT Enterprise include fintech startup Block, cosmetics giant Estee Lauder Companies and the professional services firm PwC.

The highly-anticipated announcement from OpenAI comes as the company says employees from over 80% of Fortune 500 companies have already begun using ChatGPT since it launched publicly late last year, according to its analysis of accounts associated with corporate email domains.

Before the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, a number of prominent companies including JPMorgan Chase had implemented temporary restrictions on workplace use of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT Enterprise, however, addresses one of the core issues that led to the workplace clampdowns: privacy and security concerns. Formerly, some business leaders had expressed worries about employees dropping proprietary information into ChatGPT and having that sensitive information potentially emerge as an output by the tool elsewhere. OpenAI’s announcement blog post for ChatGPT Enterprise, meanwhile, states that it does “not train on your business data or conversations, and our models don’t learn from your usage.”

OpenAI did not publicly disclose the pricing levels for ChatGPT Enterprise, instead asking potential business clients to contact its sales team.

“We look forward to sharing an even more detailed roadmap with prospective customers and continuing to evolve ChatGPT Enterprise based on your feedback,” the company said. “We’re onboarding as many enterprises as we can over the next few weeks.”

In July, Microsoft unveiled a business-specific version of its AI-powered Bing tool, dubbed Bing Chat Enterprise, and promised much of the same security assurances that ChatGPT Enterprise is now touting – namely, that users’ chat data will not be used to train AI models.

Microsoft also previously disclosed a multi-billion dollar investment into OpenAI. It’s not immediately clear how the dueling new AI tools for business will end up competing with each other.