OpenAI is preparing for an IPO as early as Q4 2026, with the CEO urging staff to transform ChatGPT from a novelty chatbot into a workplace productivity tool.
The company, serving 900 million weekly users, is targeting enterprise adoption to drive revenue growth, projecting $280 billion in total revenue by 2030.
According to a CNBC report, OpenAI is actively laying the groundwork for an initial public offering, possibly as early as the fourth quarter of 2026. As part of its efforts, the company has hired experienced financial leadership, including the former CFO from DocuSign, to manage investor relations.
The IPO from OpenAI comes amid an ever-increasing investor interest in artificial intelligence companies, like Claude, OpenAI and Perplexity. Since OpenAI is already one of the most valuable private AI companies, there are many expectations that a public debt for OpenAI could attract massive capital and potentially become one of the biggest IPOs in recent years, especially for an AI company.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, held an all-hands meeting with staffers last week, post which it was said the company is committed to helping businesses, and is “orienting aggressively” towards high-productivity use cases.
ChatGPT’s strategy update
Internally, OpenAI is pushing a clear message that ChatGPT must evolve into a “productivity tool.” The company aims to shift user perception of ChatGPT from a novelty chatbot to an essential workplace assistant used for coding, research, and enterprise tasks. This is a strategy that rivals like Anthropic and Google have capitalised early on in the AI race.
Executives from OpenAI are focusing on high-value use cases of ChatGPT that can drive revenue, especially from business customers. With hundreds of millions of users already on the platform, OpenAI is now looking to convert this scale into enterprise-level adoption of ChatGPT for long-term monetisation, ahead of the IPO.
CFO of OpenAI, Sarah Friar, is building out the company’s finance team ahead of an IPO debut by hiring Ajmere Dale, the former chief accounting officer at Block, and Cynthia Gaylor, the former CFO of DocuSign, earlier this year. Cynthia Gaylor will oversee investor relations as part of her role, according to a LinkedIn post.
Why is ChatGPT pivoting towards enterprise-level adoption?
OpenAI’s broader strategy revolves around enterprise AI solutions. The company is reportedly targeting massive long-term growth, with projections of hundreds of billions in revenue over the next decade.
To support this vision, OpenAI is also planning heavy investments in computing infrastructure, which could run into hundreds of billions of dollars. Such a scale highlights both the opportunity and the financial pressure tied to its IPO ambitions.
According to CNBC, Fidji Simo, in an internal meeting at OpenAI, said, “Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users. We’ll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool.”
What do the financials look like?
OpenAI’s IPO will mark a defining moment for the broader AI industry. Therefore, OpenAI has also been working to outline clearer spending targets after shaking financial markets with infrastructure commitments in late 2025.
Instead of the $1.4 trillion figure that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been aiming for, the company told investors in February that it’s targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, CNBC reported.
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 be more directly tied to its expected revenue growth.