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A MILLION BUSINESSES, ONE FRAGILE GRID.
One million companies now pay to use OpenAI products, from ChatGPT for Work accounts that anchor daily comms to developer seats wiring models into custom tools. Seven million total work seats now exist, a forty per cent lift in two months, with Enterprise adoption up ninefold year on year. Growth curves are steep enough to redraw the product map. Major names fill the slide deck: Amgen, Booking.com, Cisco, Target, Thermo Fisher, Morgan Stanley, and T-Mobile. Scale sits not just in logos but in seat depth, a sign of organisations moving from pilot to default.
Signals show where the stack is heading. Company Knowledge turned retrieval into the heart of value, connecting Slack, SharePoint, Drive, and GitHub so internal truth is callable in context. Codex matured into a dependable reviewer rather than a novelty generator, speeding code refactor loops and onboarding. AgentKit entered the enterprise vocabulary quietly, promising autonomous helpers with permission frameworks that satisfy compliance teams. Momentum belongs to workflow, not spectacle.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman surfaced new survey data from more than five thousand OpenAI enterprise users. Ninety-five per cent reported time saved in weekly work. Seventy per cent said they were more creative. Seventy-five per cent claimed to be doing tasks outside their skill set. Numbers built to reassure CFOs that productivity is measurable. A bigger set would have been nice, but still…data!
Readers were quick to point out that two external studies pushed in the opposite direction. MIT Media Lab recently found that most firms saw no measurable ROI from early AI spending. Stanford and BetterUp tracked a growing review tax, roughly two hours lost for every incident of low-quality output, suggesting that creative time gains can vanish in correction cycles. Look a little deeper, and method splits explain the paradox: OpenAI measured user perception inside active deployments; academics measured organisational return against profit and loss. Both can be true. Early productivity can be emotionally-led, sustained productivity is more structural.
OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar, stepped out to cool two headline fires. IPO speculation from last week faded after she confirmed no current listing plan. Focus stays on scale, not valuation. Confusion around a supposed government backstop needed a deeper air-clearing. Sam Altman stepped in to say OpenAI is not seeking financial guarantees but supports an expansion of the existing manufacturing credit under the Chips Act to cover data-centre and grid infrastructure, a call for lower cost of capital, not a bailout.
Infrastructure talk gathered more heat than the product talk. An expanded partnership with AWS brought immediate access to EC2 UltraServers and hundreds of thousands of chips, with room to scale into the tens of millions of CPUs. A thirty-eight-billion-dollar multiyear commitment locks in capacity through 2027. OpenAI also pushed to extend the existing Chips Act manufacturing credit to data-centre and grid infrastructure, lowering the cost of capital for AI compute. A far cry from bailout language, yet enough to trigger a political reflex. Energy, land, and logistics become part of product delivery. Capacity planning, once a backstage topic, will now drive the story as much as models do.
SO WHAT?
Scale no longer guarantees stability. Seven million Enterprise seats validate market demand but expose cost gravity. One million paying businesses mean less room for error, more pressure to prove returns. Valuation talk has gone quiet because viability is now the only measure that counts. Partly why OpenAI asked the Trump administration to expand a 35% Chips Act tax credit to help lower the cost of AI infrastructure.
Product strength lies in whether retrieval and coding tools turn into measurable profit, not just satisfaction. Seat expansion shows appetite, but not efficiency. The infrastructure build shows seriousness, not sustainability. Expanding the chip-tax credit exposes the future cost base of AI: data, energy, and politics intertwined.
The balance between product and infrastructure will now decide value creation. Compute supply must become user experience without margins eroding to power and chips. Every new partner or region alters latency, pricing, and governance. Enterprise customers will gain reach but inherit complexity. Public users will benefit through steadier performance yet absorb the upstream cost of grids, chips, and regulation.
One million, seven million, and counting marks a shift from novelty to operational muscle. Product cycles will now follow the pulse of power grids. Research contradictions this week mirror user experience: belief running ahead of evidence. Trust will depend on how long OpenAI can keep them aligned, and how quickly they reach the next million.
Field Notes
TECH/DEVELOPERS
Do: Benchmark new enterprise features against real workflow metrics, not just speed. Think retrieval etc.
Don’t: Assume the AWS capacity deal translates into unlimited tokens or cheaper endpoints overnight: infrastructure and cost curves move slowly.
POLICY MAKERS/REGULATORS
Do: Read the chip-tax expansion request as an industrial strategy: governments are now part of the AI supply chain.
Don’t: Frame support for data-centre credits as a subsidy or bailout: it’s positioning for grid resilience.
ENTERPRISE
Do: Treat ChatGPT for work as a maturing productivity layer rather than a side app; build habits that turn retrieval into routine.
Don’t: Confuse faster response times with deeper understanding: performance gains come from compute, not cognition.
INVESTORS
Do: Focus on compute economics and capital allocation over seat counts; margins will hinge on energy and hardware access.
Don’t: Mistake the quiet around IPO chatter for loss of momentum; private capital still fuels the build-out phase.
THIS ISSUE OF WDODTW IS SPONSORED BY:
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COMPANY ↓
OpenAI, staff/leadership profiles, board & governance, mission & values, HQ & global offices, funding rounds & investors, financial health & revenue, partnerships & alliances, organisational structure & hierarchy, regional presence & expansion
OpenAI announced it has 1 million business customers: the fastest-growing business platform in history. /OpenAI
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap was grateful to the more than 1 million business customers building with OpenAI. /OpenAI
OpenAI and AWS announced a multi-year strategic partnership to run OpenAI’s advanced AI workloads on AWS’s world-class infrastructure starting immediately. /OpenAI
OpenAI introduced the ‘Teen Safety Blueprint,’ a framework for building AI that protects, empowers, and creates safer experiences for teens. /OpenAI
OpenAI highlighted Brazil’s potential to take a leading role in the global AI ecosystem in the article ‘Brazil’s AI moment is here.’ /OpenAI
OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar, said “IPO is not on the cards right now” and that OpenAI hopes the US government will “backstop” financing of its data center deals. /WSJ
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s newsroom and Sam Altman all clarified that OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its government infrastructure. /OpenAI + @sama
Sam Altman further stated that the government should help rebuild America’s industrial base, rather than providing special loan guarantees for OpenAI. /@sama
After OpenAI CFO’s comments, Trump AI czar Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’. /CNBC
Sam Altman argued with Elon Musk on X regarding his comment that he ‘You stole a non-profit.’ /OpenAI
OpenAI was asked to stop using content to train its AI by Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco and Square Enix. /The Verge
OpenAI asked the Trump administration to expand a 35% Chips Act tax credit to help lower the cost of AI infrastructure. /Bloomberg
Meet the power broker of the AI age: Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s ‘builder-in-chief’, helping to turn Sam Altman’s trillion-dollar data centre dreams into reality. /Fortune
TECHNOLOGY ↓
ChatGPT ecosystem, DALL·E tools, Whisper audio, product roadmap, prototypes, developer access, integrations, extensions, research, innovations
OpenAI introduced ‘IndQA’, a new benchmark for evaluating AI systems on Indian culture and languages. /OpenAI
OpenAI announced that personality and custom instructions are now applied to all chats. /OpenAI
OpenAI announced that eligible customers in India will get 12 months of ChatGPT Go at no cost. /OpenAI
OpenAI updated ChatGPT to enable users to interrupt long-running queries and add new context without restarting or losing progress. /OpenAI + OpenAI
ChatGPT was set to surpass the 6 billion total monthly visits benchmark for the first time. /@similarweb
OpenAI shared the article ‘Understanding prompt injections: a frontier security challenge,’ outlining how it detects, prevents, and mitigates malicious instructions that attempt to trick AI systems into unintended actions. /OpenAI
OpenAI announced that the Sora app is now available on Android in Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the US and Vietnam. /OpenAI
ChatGPT web app released a promo for veterans - "One year of ChatGPT Plus free for eligible military members. /@btibor91.blaho.me
OpenAI shared the customer story of Chime redefining marketing through AI. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared the customer story of how CRED is tapping AI to deliver premium customer experiences. /OpenAI
OpenAI shared the story of how GPT‑5 helped unlock autonomous workflows for Notion in its rebuild for agentic AI. /OpenAI
OpenAI updated GPT-5-Codex within Codex to ‘feel better, more collaborative, and across the board.’ /OpenAI
Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder @OpenAI, shared the story of how, with 12 minutes of thinking, GPT-5 Pro suggested repurposing a known drug to treat an untreatable food allergy. /@gb
OpenAI shared a new episode in its Codex series: Code Reviews[VID]. /OpenAI
ChatGPT Enterprise will be available to the UCSF community in early 2026, as announced by UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood. /UCSF
OpenAI announced three updates for Codex: GPT-5-Codex-Mini, 50% higher rate limits for ChatGPT Plus, Business, and Edu and priority processing for ChatGPT Pro and Enterprise. /OpenAI
OpenAI announced that GPT-5-Codex-Mini allows roughly 4x more usage than GPT-5-Codex. /OpenAI
OpenAI's o1 analysed languages as well as a human expert, including inferring the phonological rules of made-up languages without prior knowledge. /Quanta Magazine
STRATEGY/IMPACT ↓
Public Policy, CSR, ESG practices, ethics & AI safety, risk management, competitive strategy, thought leadership, industry impact, market positioning & competitive strategy
Sam Altman spoke live in a Q&A at Progress Conference with Tyler Cowan on managing OpenAI's growth, delegating work, hiring hardware talent, GPT-6 enabling scientific research, AI's societal challenges, and more. [VID]. /conversations with tyler.com
OpenAI outlined how rapidly advancing AI systems are reshaping society and proposed shared safety standards, public oversight, and resilience measures to benefit humanity responsibly in “AI progress and recommendations”. /OpenAI
Greg Brockman, President & Co-Founder @OpenAI, shared the results from an OpenAI survey of more than 5,000 (or 0.05%) ChatGPT Enterprise users. /@gb
OpenAI shared @EverettRandle's dispute of a chart from Menlo Ventures stating that Anthropic had overtaken OpenAI in the enterprise LLM API market share. /OpenAI
OpenAI Global Affairs released its latest Substack edition, The Prompt: Science Up Science. /OpenAI
MISCELLANEOUS ↓
Legal, scandals, industrial action, revenue, profiles, public policy, CSR, ESG, corporate culture, ethics, risk management, Sam Altman investments, +
OpenAI was subject to seven lawsuits filed on Thursday, which claimed ChatGPT encouraged dangerous discussions and led to mental breakdowns. /NYT
Former OpenAI Head of Product Fraser Keltom [VC at @sparkcapital] presented a case against Karen Hao’s portrayal of Sam Altman in her book Empire of AI. /@Fraser
Ex-OpenAI CTO, Ilya Sutskever, discussed conflicts at OpenAI that he sent to board members before Sam Altman's firing, his OpenAI exit in a deposition. /The Information
No, ChatGPT hasn’t added a ban on giving legal and health advice. /The Verge
RESOURCES ↓
POVs, data visualisations & dashboards, key insights & metrics, industry reports & white papers, competitive analysis, recommended reading & book lists, analysis pieces & case studies +
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