OpenAI has announced the launch of a company that will help organisations build and deploy AI solutions at scale, with its announcement coming a week after Anthropic announced the launch of a similar AI services arm.
The OpenAI Deployment Company will dispatch ‘forward deployed engineers’ to clients, helping them to identify where AI can be deployed, and how their organisational structures and workflows can be redesigned to capture the fullest benefit from automation.
To support the company’s launch, OpenAI has acquired UK-based AI-consulting firm Tomoro, which will provide the new subsidiary with close to 150 experienced deployment engineers and specialists.
With Anthropic announcing a comparable AI services company in partnership with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs last week, the launch underlines how both firms are more proactively confronting the problem of supporting widespread AI adoption.
The race to acquire long-term customers
As with Anthropic’s yet-unnamed AI services firm, the OpenAI Deployment Company is the result of a partnership, which in OpenAI’s case is led by asset manager TPG.
Co-lead founding partners include Advent, Brookfield, and Bain Capital, while the founding partners are Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, BBVA, Warburg Pincus, B Capital, Goanna, Emergence Capital, and WCAS.
The subsidiary is majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI, and launches with just over $4 billion of investment, with other investors including Capgemini and McKinsey.
The motivation for launching Deployment Company is quite clear: to help companies move from an experimental relationship with AI to one where automation is central to their operations.
“The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses,” said OpenAI CRO Denise Dresser. “DeployCo is designed to help organizations bridge that gap and turn AI capability into real operational impact.”
Anthropic provided a similar explanation in its press release from last week, revealing that its new services company would work with “mid-sized” enterprises, in contrast to the Claude Partner Network it announced in March, which works with the largest enterprises.
Anthropic suggests that organisations “from community banks to mid-sized manufacturers and regional health systems” could benefit from AI, but currently lack the in-house resources to meaningfully deploy AI tools.
“Our partnerships with the world’s leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO. “This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers.”
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From box-ticking to ‘measurable revenue-based’ gains
If nothing else, these new deployment companies indicate that both OpenAI and Anthropic are thinking very seriously about how they can ultimately turn a profit from their AI models.
OpenAI’s own estimates indicate that it could lose $14 billion in 2026, which would be triple the figure for 2025, while it reportedly missed an end-of-2025 target of one billion weekly active users.
Its CFO, Sarah Friar, has internally expressed concerns that it may reach a position of being unable to afford future compute contracts if its revenue doesn’t achieve sufficient growth.
Anthropic is arguably in a less precarious position, having revealed that its annualized revenue run rate stood at $30 billion at the end of April, already up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
However, it lost an estimated $5.2 billion last year, underscoring how revenue growth needs to accelerate even faster, in order to outpace rising operating costs.
And it seems that for both Anthropic and OpenAI, one way of securing greater revenues is to launch dedicated subsidiaries that advise potential and actual clients on how best to make use of their tools.
The launch of these deployment companies come amid mixed data on AI productivity, with a recent study by AI consultancy Section indicating a split between C-suite executives and non-management workers on how useful they find LLMs.
This week also revealed that Amazon employees are using AI for pointless tasks to boost their usage scores, yet a survey published in March by the National Bureau of Employment Research concluded that “AI adoption is already widespread and associated with measurable revenue-based labor productivity gains.”
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