OpenAI's biggest problem may not be building AI but getting companies to actually use it beyond ChatGPT

OpenAI is in talks with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield Asset Management to create a joint venture that would sell OpenAI's products to companies in the investors' portfolios and beyond, Reuters reports.

The deal has a pre-money valuation of roughly 10 billion dollars. The investors would put in about 4 billion dollars, get board seats, and have a say in how the technology gets used across their portfolio companies. TPG would be the largest investor. According to Reuters, OpenAI's enterprise business currently brings in 10 billion dollars out of a total annualized revenue of 25 billion dollars. OpenAI is offering preferred shares, meaning shares with priority on earnings.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, confirms the company is also building its own deployment arm, a dedicated team for rolling out the technology inside companies, and will "share more details soon." Simo shared some general numbers on OpenAI's B2B adoption: more than one million companies use OpenAI products, Codex has over two million weekly users, and API usage jumped 20 percent in the week after GPT-5.4 launched.

OpenAI's real bottleneck is getting AI into companies

According to Simo, demand for Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise AI agent platform, already outpaces what the company can deliver. To close that gap, OpenAI wants to embed its own engineers directly inside customer organizations. Simo says preparations with investors and partners have been underway since December.

Back in February, OpenAI announced Frontier Alliances, a partner program with consultancies like McKinsey, Accenture, BCG, and Capgemini. A joint venture with private equity firms would open yet another channel for getting these products into companies. These investors control large portfolios of businesses, can steer budgets, and fast-track AI projects across their holdings.

All of this points to the same conclusion: OpenAI's real bottleneck is getting the technology into existing company workflows. That takes people on the ground who can adapt processes, data, and software. Of course, OpenAI isn't alone in recognizing this challenge. Anthropic is reportedly holding talks with Blackstone, Permira, and Hellman & Friedman about a roughly one-billion-dollar joint venture for its Claude AI.