Aiming to catch up with rivals in 2026, OpenAI has reorganized some of its leadership team and selected familiar faces to lead the company in driving AI sales to enterprise customers.
The Information reports, citing an internal OpenAI memo, that the company has appointed Barrett Zoff to lead its efforts to sell AI to enterprises.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information.
Zoff returned to OpenAI last week after leaving former OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machine Labs, where he had been co-founder and chief technology officer since October 2024.
The exact circumstances of his departure are unclear, with rumors swirling that Zoph and several other former OpenAI employees were either fired, left voluntarily, or perhaps had plans to return to OpenAI all along.
Zoph was VP of Post-Training Inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He will take on a completely different position and will play a key role in the company’s efforts to grow its enterprise business, which is losing ground to competitors.
OpenAI released its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023, more than a year before Anthropic and several years before Google launched its enterprise offering. The company claims its product has more than 5 million business users and includes companies like SoftBank, Target, and Lowe’s as customers.
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However, the company’s market share is declining while its competitors are rising.
Anthropic holds a commanding lead over its AI rivals when it comes to using language models at scale in the enterprise. According to a December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures, AI Institute has a 40% market share (notably, the company is an active investor in Anthropic). As of July, the startup’s market share was estimated at 32%.
Google’s Gemini adoption is becoming more steady, according to Menlo Ventures. Although the company released its enterprise product last fall, its market share for enterprise LLM use has remained largely unchanged, increasing from 20% in July to 21% at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s usage market share has fallen from 50% in 2023 to 27% by the end of 2025, a trend that seems to worry the company. In an internal memo several months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed concern that Google Gemini’s growth was starting to eat into OpenAI.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in a blog post on Sunday that enterprise growth is an area of focus for the company in 2026.
The company then announced an expanded multi-year partnership with ServiceNow that will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.
