OpenAI has reshuffled some of its leaders and appointed a familiar face to lead the push into selling AI to business customers as the company looks to catch up with its rivals in 2026.
The company has appointed Barret Zoph to lead efforts to sell AI to enterprises, according to the report report from The Informationciting an internal OpenAI memo.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for confirmation and more information.
Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labsformer co-founder of OpenAI, Mira Murati’s AI startup where Zoph has served as co-founder and chief technology officer since October 2024.
The situation at the time of departure is not clear, with rumors swirling about whether Zoph and several other former OpenAI employees were fired or left of their own accordmaybe with plans to go back to OpenAI altogether.
Zoph was previously vice president of post-training inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He is stepping into a very different position and will likely play an important role in the company as it will grow the company’s business – an area where it is losing to competitors.
OpenAI launched its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023 more than a year before Anthropic, and years before Google, launched its enterprise offering. The company claims its product has more than 5 million business users and counts companies including SoftBank, Target and Loewe as customers.
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But its market share fell while its competition rose.
Anthropic has a dominant lead over AI rivals when it comes to the company’s use of large language models. AI research labs have a 40% market share, according to a December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures (which, it should be noted, has invested aggressively in Anthropic). In July, the startup’s market share was about 32%.
Google’s Gemini adoption is steady, Menlo Ventures says. The company released its enterprise product last fall and saw the company’s LLM usage market share remain largely the same, growing from 20% in July to 21% by the end of the year.
OpenAI on the other hand has reduced its usage market share from 50% in 2023 to 27% by the end of 2025 – a trend that seems to concern companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed concern that the growth of Google Gemini began to encroach on OpenAI in an internal memo a few months ago.
Company growth is a focus area for companies in 2026, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a post a blog on Sunday.
The company has since announced a extended multi-year partnership with ServiceNow which will give ServiceNow customers access to the OpenAI model.