OpenAI preps for IPO by end of year, tells employees ChatGPT must be 'productivity tool'

<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/27/open-ai-funding-round-amazon.html">OpenAI</a> is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/">artificial intelligence</a> startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/05/open-ai-frontier-enterprise-customers.html">Fidji Simo</a>, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, held an all-hands meeting with staffers last week and said the company is committed to helping businesses, and is "orienting aggressively" towards high-productivity use cases. </p>
<p>OpenAI kickstarted the generative AI boom with the launch of <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/sam-altman-touts-chatgpt-growth-as-openai-nears-100-billion-funding.html">ChatGPT</a> in 2022, and the chatbot now supports more than <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/openai-resets-spend-expectations-targets-around-600-billion-by-2030.html">900 million</a> weekly active users. But the company is still racing to grab market share, particularly in the enterprise, away from rivals like <a href="/quotes/GOOGL/">Google</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/anthropic-claude-emil-michael-defense.html">Anthropic</a>, which is also weighing an IPO. </p>
<p>"Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users," Simo said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting reviewed by CNBC. "We'll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool."</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-chatgpt-side-projects-16b3a825?mod=Searchresults&amp;amp;pos=1&amp;amp;page=1">Wall Street Journal</a> was first to report the all-hands meeting. </p>
<p>OpenAI's IPO could land as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The exact timing is still subject to change, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.</p>
<p>CFO Sarah Friar is building out OpenAI's finance team ahead of a market debut, hiring Ajmere Dale, the former chief accounting officer at <a href="/quotes/XYZ/">Block,</a> and Cynthia Gaylor, the former CFO of <a href="/quotes/DOCU/">DocuSign</a>, earlier this year. Gaylor will oversee investor relations as part of her role, according to a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-friar_im-excited-to-welcome-two-exceptional-leaders-activity-7421914943089942529-Quze/?utm_source=share&amp;amp;utm_medium=member_desktop&amp;amp;rcm=ACoAADNfoYsBa_U_m9rWgS9RUKt-87ky6JLQ-Eo">LinkedIn post</a>. </p>
<p>In December, OpenAI declared a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/open-ai-code-red-google-anthropic.html">"code red" effort</a> to improve ChatGPT in the face of increasingly stiff competition from Google and Anthropic. The company temporarily pulled back on other investments in areas like health, shopping and advertising. </p>
<p>Simo said during the March all-hands meeting that OpenAI is moving with the same amount of urgency that it did in December, but noted that the company can't declare everything an emergency.</p>
<p>"What really matters for us right now is staying focused and executing extremely well," Simo said.</p>
<p>OpenAI has also been working to outline <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/openai-resets-spend-expectations-targets-around-600-billion-by-2030.html">clearer spending targets</a> after <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/28/a-look-at-openais-tangled-web-of-dealmaking.html">rattling markets</a> with ambitious infrastructure commitments in late 2025. </p>
<p>Instead of the $1.4 trillion figure that OpenAI CEO <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/sam-altman/">Sam Altman</a> had been touting, the company told investors in February that it's targeting roughly <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/openai-resets-spend-expectations-targets-around-600-billion-by-2030.html">$600 billion</a> in total compute spend by 2030, CNBC previously reported. </p>
<p>OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280 billion, with nearly equal contributions from its consumer and enterprise businesses. The $600 billion figure the company is offering is meant to more directly tie to its expected revenue growth.</p>
<p>WATCH: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/03/17/openai-renews-focus-on-enterprise-in-all-hands-meeting-amid-ipo-push.html">OpenAI renews focus on enterprise in all-hands meeting amid IPO push</a></p>