I wonder if OpenAI can break into enterprise. I don’t see much of a path for them, at least here in the EU. Even if they do manage to build some sort of trust as far as data safety goes, and I’m not sure they’ll have much more luck with that than Facebook had trying to sell that corporate thing they did (still do?). But if they did, they will still be facing the very real issue of having to compete with Microsoft.

I view that competition a bit like the Teams vs anything else. Teams wasn’t better, but it was good enough and it’s “sort of free”. It’s the same with the Azure AI tools, they aren’t feee but since you don’t exactly pay list pricing in enterprise they can be fairly cheap. Co-pilot is obviously horrible compared to CharGPT, but a lot of the Azure AI tooling works perfectly well and much of it integrates seamlessly with what you already have running in Azure. We recently “lost” our OCR for a document flow, and since it wasn’t recoverable we needed to do something fast. Well the Azure Document Intelligence was so easy to hook up to the flow it was ridiculous. I don’t want to sound like a Microsoft commercial. I think they are a good IT business partner, but the products are also sort of a trap where all those tiny things create the perfect vendor lock-in. Which is bad, but it’s also where European Enterprise is at since the “monopoly” Microsoft has on the suite of products makes it very hard to not use them. Teams again being the perfect example since it “won” by basically being a 0 in the budget even though it isn’t actually free.