OpenAI pivots, trims costly projects

OpenAI is cutting back consumer moonshots and steering harder toward corporate customers as leadership exits pile up ahead of a possible initial public offering. On April 8, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said enterprise already makes up more than 40% of OpenAI’s revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026. She said the company’s application programming interfaces now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute and named Goldman Sachs, Philips, and State Farm among customers. OpenAI has also been building products for that market. In February, it launched Frontier, a platform for companies to build and manage artificial intelligence agents, and said HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber were early adopters. The retrenchment has been visible inside the company. CNBC reported on April 17 that Bill Peebles, who led Sora, Kevin Weil, who had been leading OpenAI for Science, and Srinivas Narayanan, the chief technology officer of business-to-business applications, are leaving after OpenAI shut Sora last month and decentralized its science effort. Those moves follow other recent changes. CNBC reported that Fidji Simo took a medical leave, Kate Rouch stepped down to focus on cancer recovery, and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap shifted to a “special projects” role. OpenAI has been laying the groundwork for a company that looks more like a conventional public-market business. CNBC reported in October 2025 that OpenAI completed a restructuring in which its nonprofit kept a controlling equity stake in the for-profit arm, a step that made an initial public offering more feasible. That is where the governance questions land. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 17 that some investors are questioning whether Sam Altman is the right chief executive to lead OpenAI into the public markets and are weighing whether Chair Bret Taylor could eventually replace him. The same Wall Street Journal report said Altman’s outside investments remain hard for investors and partners to assess for conflicts, including his push for OpenAI to lead a funding round for Helion, the fusion startup he backs personally. AllSides’ summary of the Journal’s reporting said the company is discussing a public listing this year at around an $850 billion valuation. OpenAI’s own filings and blog posts make the business case for the pivot. The company said in December 2025 that more than 1 million business customers use its tools, and argued that enterprise revenue can fund broader free access to artificial intelligence products. So the picture in April 2026 is narrower and more legible: fewer expensive side bets, more sales to big companies, and more scrutiny of the executive team expected to sell that story to public investors.