By Rachel Metz

OpenAI launched a corporate version of ChatGPT with added features and privacy safeguards, the startup’s most significant effort yet to attract a broad mix of business customers and boost revenue from its best-known product.

As with consumer versions of the company’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, users can type in a prompt and receive a written response from ChatGPT Enterprise.  The new tool includes unlimited use of OpenAI’s most powerful generative AI model, GPT-4, as well as data encryption and a guarantee that the startup won’t use data from customers to develop its technology. The offering also offers the ability to type in much longer prompts.

The rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise is a move forward in OpenAI’s plans to make money from its ubiquitous chatbot, which is enormously popular but very expensive to operate because robust AI models require lots of computing power. The San Francisco-based startup has already taken some steps toward generating revenue from ChatGPT, such as by selling a premium subscription and offering companies paid access to its application programming interface, which developers can use to add the chatbot to other apps.

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, declined to provide specific details for how much ChatGPT Enterprise will cost, noting it can vary based on the needs of each business. Lightcap said the company “can work with everyone to figure out the best plan for them.”

“We’ve really tried to build the best version of ChatGPT,” Lightcap said in an interview. “That was the mandate for the team: How do we build something that’s the ultimate productivity enhancer?’”

OpenAI worked with more than 20 companies, from small startups to larger firms, that had a range of experience with AI to test ChatGPT Enterprise, Lightcap said. Existing users include beauty company Estée Lauder Cos., design software maker Canva Inc. and automation platform Zapier Inc. Early customers of the product are tapping it for tasks like coding, helping with creative work and answering business questions, according to OpenAI. 

ChatGPT has been used by more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies since it was rolled out in November, OpenAI said. But even as a growing number of organizations have found ways to use ChatGPT for coding and brainstorming, some businesses have purposely stayed away from the chatbot and a growing number of competing AI tools because of concerns about the security and privacy of company and customer data. 

In an effort to address those concerns, OpenAI said it won’t train its AI models — the process of feeding new content to generative AI technology to increase its knowledge base — with prompts or data from companies using ChatGPT Enterprise. The startup now trains its models on the written prompts users feed ChatGPT online or through its mobile apps, unless users opt to withhold them, though its software filters out personally identifiable information that comes in from users. It doesn’t train its AI on data sent via its API.

Some companies have also worried about the propensity of large language models, the technology underpinning ChatGPT, to make things up. Lightcap pointed out that GPT-4, first unveiled in March, is less prone to fabricating results than the previous AI model.

“Whether you’re building on our API or using ChatGPT in a personal capacity as a consumer or using it in a work context as an enterprise, we want to serve the highest-quality model, the best models, in all of those places,” Lightcap said.