As forward deployed engineers become the hottest new role in AI, OpenAI is trying forward deployed partners.
On Thursday, the AI lab announced a partnership with IBM to embed its technology into IBM's consulting arm. Through the partnership, IBM's forward-deployed units, trained through the OpenAI Partner Network, will help enterprise clients modernize their workflows with OpenAI's tech.
Additionally, IBM will join OpenAI's "elite partner tier," and will launch a dedicated OpenAI Practice that includes thousands of consultants and engineers, specifically trained with OpenAI certifications.
Colleen Kapase, OpenAI's vice president of global partnerships and ecosystem, exclusively told The Deep View that partnering with IBM represents a "significant" opportunity. "IBM works with enterprises around the world and across virtually every major industry, including many of the complex and highly regulated environments where AI can have enormous impact."
The partnership has three areas of focus:
- Updating legacy operations with OpenAI's frontier models, including GPT-5.6 and products like Codex and ChatGPT Work, across domains including finance, procurement, customer operations, and HR
- Modernizing legacy applications and software development using Codex and ChatGPT Work, aiming to help enterprises simplify engineering processes and speed up product shipment
- And increasing IBM's participation in Project Daybreak by combining OpenAI's cyber capabilities with IBM Autonomous Security, its agentic security platform, to help clients manage both cyber and AI model risk
The goal of the partnership is to help IBM Consulting enterprise clients get beyond one of the major hurdles standing in the way of successful AI deployments: The fact that so much enterprise work relies on fragmented legacy systems and tools that aren't well fitted for the modern and fast-paced nature of AI, Andy Baldwin, global senior vice president of IBM Consulting, told The Deep View.
"Most organizations don’t struggle with getting access to AI tools or models anymore. The real challenge is putting AI to work securely at scale and effectively across large, complex organizations," said Baldwin. "At the same time, AI is changing the threat landscape. Organizations are facing more sophisticated, AI-enabled threats and growing pressure to strengthen and build agentic first cyber defenses
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This partnership comes as enterprises face a particularly significant crossroads. Many enterprises want to embed AI throughout their organizations. However, as models get stronger, the cybersecurity risks grow more daunting, with models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta all revealing powerful cybersecurity capabilities (and accidental breaches) that surprised even the researchers creating and testing them. As such, enterprises walk a fine line between constantly adopting while rapidly securing. On top of that, many organizations are facing mounting pressure to see returns as costs grow. A partnership like this could help organizations strike the balance between all three factors, or it could lock organizations into using OpenAI products instead of potentially cheaper alternatives, such as open and custom models.