OpenAI has reorganized its leadership and selected a familiar figure to head its push into selling AI to business customers. The company aims to catch up to its rivals in 2026.
The company appointed Barret Zoph to lead its efforts to sell AI to enterprises, according to an internal memo. Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati. At that startup, Zoph had served as a co-founder and chief technology officer since October 2024.
The exact circumstances of his departure are not clear. There have been rumors about whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees were fired or left on their own accord, possibly with plans to return to OpenAI all along.
Zoph was previously the vice president of post-training inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He is now stepping into a very different position and will likely play an important role as the company looks to grow its enterprise business, an area where it is losing ground to competitors.
OpenAI launched its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023, more than a year before Anthropic and multiple years before Google launched their enterprise offerings. The company claims the product has more than 5 million business users and counts companies including SoftBank, Target, and Lowe’s as customers.
But its market share is falling while its rivals are climbing. Anthropic holds a dominant lead over its AI rivals in enterprise large language model usage. The AI research lab holds a 40 percent market share, according to a December report. In July, the startup’s market share was estimated to be 32 percent.
Google’s Gemini adoption has been steadier. The company released its enterprise product last fall and has seen its enterprise LLM usage market share largely stay the same, growing from 20 percent in July to 21 percent at the end of the year.
OpenAI, on the other hand, has seen its usage market share drop from 50 percent in 2023 to 27 percent at the end of 2025. This is a trend that appears to concern the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed concern that Google Gemini’s growth was starting to encroach on OpenAI in an internal memo a few months ago.
Enterprise growth is an area of focus for the company in 2026. The company has since announced an expanded multi-year partnership with ServiceNow that will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.