OpenAI has reshuffled some of its leadership and tapped a familiar face to lead its push to sell artificial intelligence to business customers as the company looks to catch up with rivals in 2026.
The company has appointed Barret Zoph to lead its efforts to sell its AI to enterprises, according to 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 Labs, the AI startup of former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, where Zoph had served as co-founder and CTO since October 2024.
The exact circumstances of his departure are not clear, with rumors swirl about whether Zoph and some other former OpenAI employees were fired or left of their own free willpossibly with plans to return to OpenAI from scratch.
Zoph was previously vice president of post-learning inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He’s in a very different position and will likely play an important role at the company as it tries to grow its business — an area where it’s losing ground to competitors.
OpenAI launched its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023 more than a year before Anthropic and several years before Google launched its enterprise offerings. The company claims the product has more than 5 million business users and counts the likes of SoftBank, Target and Lowe’s as customers.
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But its market share is falling while its competitors are rising.
Anthropic has a commanding lead over its AI rivals in using large language models for business. The AI research lab has 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 estimated at 32%.
Google’s adoption of Gemini has been steadier, according to Menlo Ventures. The company launched its enterprise product last fall and saw its share of the enterprise LLM usage market remain largely the same, according to Menlo’s findings, rising from 20% in July to 21% at the end of the year.
OpenAI, on the other hand, has seen its usage market share drop from 50% in 2023 to 27% at the end of 2025 — a trend that seems to concern the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed concern that Google’s Gemini development was beginning to encroach on OpenAI in an internal memo a few months ago.
Business growth is an area of focus for the company in 2026, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post last Sunday.
Since then the company has announced a extended multi-year cooperation with ServiceNow which will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.
