OpenAI has hired Brian McCarthy from SpaceX as its first vice-president of worldwide sales, a sign that the ChatGPT maker is assembling a traditional enterprise sales force to win corporate customers.
McCarthy is the first major hire by Dali Rajic, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, who took up the newly created post less than a month ago.
Rajic has also recruited two senior figures from Snowflake, the data-analytics company, adding Mark Fleming, its head of enterprise sales, and Jaime Patel, its head of enterprise sales engineering for North America.
The moves point to a shift away from relying on customers finding OpenAI's products themselves, towards courting large accounts with tailored deployments, integrations and long-term contracts.
McCarthy is a familiar hand for Rajic, having reported to him at the software firm AppDynamics, where the two worked together before Cisco bought the company a day ahead of its planned stock market listing.
He joined SpaceX only in August, through its purchase of the coding startup Cursor, and his departure comes just weeks after OpenAI cut Cursor off from its models.
His brief is to expand OpenAI's corporate customer base and drive growth overseas.
The hiring reflects how central business customers have become as OpenAI prepares for a stock market flotation expected next year.
The company, valued at about $852 billion, says its enterprise customer base has passed 2 million and wants business clients to supply half its revenue by the end of 2026.
It is also locked in a contest with Anthropic, the maker of the rival Claude assistant, for corporate AI budgets.
OpenAI has not set out a timetable for the new sales organisation, leaving customer wins as the next milestone to watch.
