Openai’s company recruitment appears to be accelerating at the expense of rivals

According to trading data from FinTech Firm Ramp, Openai appears to be getting corporate spending well ahead of its rivals in the race.

As of April, 32.4% of US companies paid subscriptions to Subscriptions, Platforms and Tools, according to RAMP’s AI Index, which estimates the business adoption rates of AI products based on RAMP’s card and bill pay data. This is up from 18.9% in January and 28% in March.

Competitors are struggling to make similar advancements, Ramp’s data shows. As of last month, only 8% of companies had subscriptions to human products, compared to 4.6% in January. Meanwhile, Google AI subscriptions fell from 2.3% in February to 0.1% in April.

“Openai continues to add customers faster than any other business on the Ramp platform,” Ramp Economist Ara Kharzian wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. “Our (…) RAMP AI index shows the adoption of a business where OpenAI grows faster than its competitors.”

To be clear, RAMP’s AI index is not a perfect measure. We only look at a sample of company spending data from around 30,000 companies. Additionally, indexes use merchant names and line items details to identify AI products and services, which may lead to miss out on spending that has been grouped together in other cost centers.

Still, the numbers suggest that Openai is bolstering grip in the large, growing enterprise market for AI.

In a report published in April, Openai said it has over 2 million business users, up from 1 million as of September. The company expects that the company’s revenue will contribute significantly to its bottom line. According to Bloomberg, Openai is projecting $12.7 billion this year and $29.4 billion in 2026.

Openai does not expect positive cash flow until 2029. It plans to charge business customers thousands of dollars for professional AI “agents” designed to aid software engineering and research tasks.