OpenAI has reshuffled some of its management and tapped a familiar face to lead its push to sell AI to business customers as the company looks to catch up with its rivals in 2026.
The company named Barret Zoph to lead its efforts to sell its AI to businesses, according to reporting by The Information, citing an internal OpenAI memo.
TechCrunch contacted OpenAI for confirmation and more information.
Zoph returned to OpenAI last week after leaving Thinking Machine Labs, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s AI startup, where Zoph had served as co-founder and CTO since October 2024.
The exact circumstances of his departure are not clear, with rumors swirling about whether Zoph and a few other former OpenAI employees were fired or left on their own, possibly with plans to return to OpenAI all along.
Zoph was previously vice president of post-training inference at OpenAI from September 2022 to October 2024. He’s stepping into a very different position and is likely to play an important role in the company as it looks to grow its enterprise business — an area where it’s losing ground to competitors.
OpenAI launched its enterprise-focused ChatGPT Enterprise product in 2023, more than a year before Anthropic and several years before Google launched its enterprise offerings. The company claims the product has more than 5 million business users and counts companies including SoftBank, Target and Lowe’s as customers.
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But its market share is falling while its rivals are rising.
Anthropic has a dominant edge over its AI rivals when it comes to using large language models. The AI ​​research lab has a 40% market share, according to a December report from VC firm Menlo Ventures (which, it should be noted, has invested aggressively in Anthropic). In July, the startup’s market share was estimated at 32%.
Google’s Gemini adoption has been more steady, according to Menlo Ventures. The company released its enterprise product last fall and has seen its market share for enterprise LLM use remain largely the same, according to Menlo’s results, growing from 20% in July to 21% by year-end.
OpenAI, on the other hand, has seen its market share drop from 50% in 2023 to 27% by the end of 2025 – a trend that seems to worry the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman specifically expressed concern that Google Gemini’s growth was starting to encroach on OpenAI in an internal memo a few months ago.
Business growth is an area of ​​focus for the company in 2026, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a blog post last Sunday.
The company has since announced an expanded multi-year partnership with ServiceNow that will give ServiceNow customers access to OpenAI models.