The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people.
You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth.
When I say "boring", I don't mean as "capitalism requires exponential growth" critique. I mean OpenAI valuation is not priced for that. They're priced for singularity. If the bulk of their revenue turns out to be bodyshop, that's...quite a different math.
The way to charge big with this kind of work is to do what big consultancies (MBB, IBM, etc) do: brand equity and (supposed) expertise in solving domain problems. OpenAI has ... interesting tech.
It's going to be interesting seeing if they can pull this off. If I were a betting man, my money would be on "no".
or smth
> Investors also include leading consulting and systems integration firms, including Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company.
All of these companies are invested in Palantir too right? Why does this “deployment company” sound like more Palantir?
They seemed like an indictment of the technology as a whole. The LLM character proxies all spoke with the LLM-cadence and phrasing. Because we all know it. LLM writing is very uncanny valley. And they didn't even try to deny this. It made LLMs itself look like a joke.
Look at electricity in factories and how long it took to have an impact, as well as the massive, massive lag between Visicalc and economy wide productivity increases.
I personally do believe that the foundation model companies are a terrible business, but that the technology itself is definitely useful (even if it's vastly unlikely to go full Singularity).
But so is Anthropic and all of Big Tech, so there's that.
Consultant you pay to come to your company. Forward Deployed Engineers are payed by the other company to push you spending money at their company.
For OpenAI having more companies using OpenAI and buying tokens etc. helps them and they do have a typical issue: they can move as fast as they want, if no one else is moving with them...
OpenAI is launching the OpenAI Deployment Company, a new company designed to help organizations build and deploy AI systems they can rely on every day across their most important work.
Successful AI deployment is about empowering people and teams to do more. The OpenAI Deployment Company will extend OpenAI’s ability to embed engineers specialized in frontier AI deployment, known as Forward Deployed Engineers, or FDEs, into organizations working on complex problems in demanding environments. These FDEs will work closely with business leaders, operators, and frontline teams to identify where AI can make the biggest impact, redesign organizational infrastructure and critical workflows around it, and turn those gains into durable systems.
In connection with the OpenAI Deployment Company’s launch, OpenAI has agreed to acquire Tomoro, an applied AI consulting and engineering firm that helps enterprises turn AI into operational advantage. The acquisition will bring approximately 150 experienced Forward Deployed Engineers and Deployment Specialists to the OpenAI Deployment Company from day one.
The OpenAI Deployment Company is a committed partnership between OpenAI and 19 leading global investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators. The partnership is led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, and B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus, and WCAS as founding partners.
Investors also include leading consulting and systems integration firms, including Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company. The Deployment Company will also work closely with and alongside OpenAI’s Frontier Alliance partners and the broader industry to drive AI adoption and change management globally.
The OpenAI Deployment Company is majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI, giving customers a unified experience whether they work with OpenAI, the OpenAI Deployment Company, or both. It will launch with more than $4 billion of initial investment, which it will use to scale operations and acquire firms that can accelerate our mission of broadly beneficial AI deployment.
OpenAI was founded as a research and deployment company. From the beginning, we have believed that building powerful AI models is only part of the work. Real impact comes from helping people and organizations use those systems safely, effectively, and at scale.
Over the past several years, more than one million businesses have adopted OpenAI’s products and APIs. Across those deployments, one pattern has become increasingly clear: the next stage of enterprise AI will be defined by how effectively businesses can deploy this technology into real-world use cases, and how well we and our Alliance partner ecosystem can help them.
As models become more capable, businesses can apply AI to larger, more important parts of how they operate. The work now is helping organizations rethink critical workflows around intelligence that can reason, act, and deliver measurable results.
We launched the OpenAI Deployment Company as a standalone business unit so it can develop the operating model, pace, and customer focus this work requires. At the same time, the OpenAI Deployment Company will operate as an extension of OpenAI, keeping customers closely connected to the research, product, and in-house deployment teams shaping frontier AI.
That connection is a major advantage. The OpenAI Deployment Company FDEs will be able to build for where OpenAI’s frontier capabilities are headed, giving customers systems designed to improve as new models, tools, and deployment patterns come online. Customers can move faster from day one, spend capital on durable systems, and stay ahead of competitors by building around the capabilities that are coming next.
FDEs will work alongside business leaders, technology leaders, operators, and frontline teams to rethink critical operations, processes, and workflows from the ground up. Their role is to help organizations move from identifying high-value AI opportunities to building production systems that deliver measurable results.
A typical OpenAI Deployment Company engagement will begin with a focused diagnostic of where AI can create the most value, followed by a small number of priority workflows selected with the customer’s leadership and operating teams. The OpenAI Deployment Company FDEs will then work inside the organization to design, build, test, and deploy production systems, connecting OpenAI models to the customer’s data, tools, controls, and business processes so teams can use them reliably in day-to-day work.
The Tomoro team will bring deep experience building and operating real-time AI systems in complex enterprise environments. Its work spans mission-critical workflows for companies such as Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Supercell, where reliability, integration, governance, and measurable business impact matter from the start.
As part of the OpenAI Deployment Company after closing, the team will strengthen OpenAI’s ability to help customers move from use case selection to production deployment faster. Its engineers will help connect OpenAI models to customers’ data, tools, controls, and core business processes, accelerating DeployCo’s ability to deploy AI systems that work in day-to-day operations.
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the coming months.
The OpenAI Deployment Company’s investment and consulting partners sponsor more than 2,000 businesses around the world, and its consulting and integrator partners work with many thousands more. These organizations span industries, company sizes, and workflows, giving the OpenAI Deployment Company a broad view of where AI can create value and which deployment patterns can scale.
The private equity sponsors also bring deep, repeatable experience helping companies execute operating transformation and change management across their portfolios. That capability is highly complementary to OpenAI and the OpenAI Deployment Company’s technical, product, and frontier AI deployment expertise. Together, the partnership can help customers identify and build the right AI systems, redesign workflows around them, drive adoption across teams, and turn AI deployment into durable operating change.
The OpenAI Deployment Company benefits from this combination: OpenAI’s visibility into where frontier AI capabilities are headed, and its partners’ practical experience helping companies execute complex transformations at scale. That will help OpenAI and the OpenAI Deployment Company learn faster, generalize the most effective solution patterns, and bring those lessons to more organizations across the economy.
“AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organizations. The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses. DeployCo is designed to help organizations bridge that gap and turn AI capability into real operational impact.”
— Denise Dresser, Chief Revenue Officer at OpenAI