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SECURE YOUR SEAT OpenAI’s enterprise ambitions have found a new target: ad teams.
The company is hiring a San Francisco-based head of ads enterprise marketing to shape that positioning, according to a vacancy currently on OpenAI’s careers page. The role is tasked with building “the content, thought leadership, events and demand programs needed to drive enterprise advertising pipeline and long-term growth”.
The role comes with a compensation package between $374,000 and $415,000 plus equity, according to the job posting. The successful candidate will also “shape the narratives that position OpenAI as a premium advertising platform for the world’s marketers” and “establish OpenAI as a trusted, differentiated platform for enterprise advertisers and agencies”.
While the role will personify OpenAI’s enterprise ad ambitions, they’re already in motion. According to one U.S. ad exec, who is familiar with OpenAI’s sales efforts so far, OpenAI reps have been “pretty clear” that the company is currently focused on building for enterprise-level businesses.
“They’ve got to drive that initial ad revenue in order to continue building other solutions that will eventually support smaller businesses,” they said. “But I do think that right now they’re still fairly focused on the enterprise.”
Recent updates to OpenAI’s ads manager bear that out. One of those features, for example, is custom audiences, which, according to Accuracast group CEO Farhad Divecha, is unlikely to be useful for many small businesses.
“The minimum audience size OpenAI is currently offering is 25,000,” he said. “That’s only going to be an enterprise client. Most small businesses are not going to have 25,000 strong customer databases that they can upload.”
Other recent additions are similarly geared toward advertisers managing larger or more sophisticated campaigns. The platform’s self-serve buying platform now includes notifications and flags that tell advertisers when campaigns are running low on budget, as well as account-health indicators that analyse key performance metrics. The platform also generates charts that advertisers can use to report campaign performance internally, including to CMOs or other C-suite execs. Moreover, the platform is also starting to automate some of the work of campaign optimisation, suggesting alternative headlines and ad copy that advertisers can swap into campaigns.
These are the kinds of tools a small business owner running their own ads rarely needs but a media team juggling dozens of campaigns and a CMO asking for numbers absolutely does.
The ad push is also a natural extension of the broader enterprise strategy OpenAI has been building around its AI products: rather than simply selling access to its models, the company is building the controls, integrations, partner network and sales infrastructure needed to embed its technology into large organisations. Its advertising business is beginning to follow the same playbook, with dedicated enterprise marketing, agency partnerships and technical support for advertisers.
“OpenAI is clearly building an ad platform that can support larger advertisers, but I think it’s too early to characterize it as an enterprise ad platform,” said Brian Kane, COO of Sourcepoint by Didomi. “The current feature set feels much more commerce-focused than what I’d call truly enterprise-focused.”
None of this means that OpenAI is ignoring small and medium-sized businesses. On the contrary, the company is currently building out an SMB team to court those advertisers to the platform. They are, after all, the backbone of any durable, scaled ads business.
“In the U.S. they’re allowing more location-based targeting and exclusions of specific GEOs, which to me, indicates they are at least starting to think about building for these smaller brands who may be only relevant in certain local footprints,” said the U.S. ad exec. “That to me is a signal that they are going to start supporting more of these smaller businesses eventually.”
But in order to have the capital to build the infrastructure, OpenAI needs bigger budgets on board first, in order to support a much broader advertiser base.
“With OpenAI trying to take a page out of Google’s tried and tested playbook, they too want to show advertisers that the scale is there,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, svp paid media at Zeno Group. “Proactive performance enhancement flags are another way for OpenAI to make activation easier for advertisers.”
OpenAI did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.
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