OpenAI’s enterprise adoption appears to be accelerating, at the expense of rivals

OpenAI appears to be pulling well ahead of rivals in the race to capture enterprises’ AI spend, according to transaction data from fintech firm Ramp.

According to Ramp’s AI Index, which estimates the business adoption rate of AI products by drawing on Ramp’s card and bill pay data, 32.4% of U.S. businesses were paying for subscriptions to OpenAI AI models, platforms, and tools as of April. That’s up from 18.9% in January and 28% in March.

Competitors have struggled to make similar progress, Ramp’s data shows. Just 8% of businesses had subscriptions to Anthropic’s products as of last month compared to 4.6% in January. Meanwhile, Google AI subscriptions saw a decline from 2.3% in February to 0.1% in April.

“OpenAI continues to add customers faster than any other business on Ramp’s platform,” wrote Ramp economist Ara Kharazian in a blog post published Tuesday. “Our … Ramp AI Index shows business adoption of OpenAI growing faster than competitor model companies.”

To be clear, Ramp’s AI Index isn’t a perfect measure. It only looks at a sample of corporate spend data from around 30,000 companies. Moreover, because the index identifies AI products and services using merchant name and line-item details, it likely misses spend lumped into other cost centers.

Still, the figures suggest that OpenAI is strengthening its grip on the large and growing enterprise market for AI.

In a report published in April, OpenAI said that it had over 2 million business users, an increase from 1 million users as of September. The company expects enterprise revenue to contribute significantly to its bottom line. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI is projecting $12.7 billion in revenue this year and $29.4 billion in 2026.

OpenAI, which doesn’t anticipate being cash-flow positive until 2029, is considering plans to charge business customers thousands of dollars for specialized AI “agents” designed to aid with software engineering and research tasks.

Updated May 12 at 8:32 a.m. Pacific: Corrected the spelling of Ara Kharazian’s name.