OpenAI is nabbing Microsoft customers, fuelling partners' rivalry

OpenAI's nascent strength in the enterprise market is giving its partner and biggest investor indigestion

- Bloomberg

Last spring, drugmaker Amgen Inc. announced plans to buy Microsoft Corp.'s Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for 20,000 employees. It was a timely endorsement of the software company's multibillion-dollar bet on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and Microsoft touted its new Copilot customer in three separate case studies.

Thirteen months later, Amgen employees are using a rival product: OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Amgen expanded its use of ChatGPT earlier this year after seeing the technology improve and hearing from employees that it helped with such tasks as research and summarizing scientific documents.

"OpenAI has done a tremendous job making their product fun to use," said senior vice president Sean Bruich. Copilot is still a "pretty important tool," he added, but more so for use with Microsoft products such as Outlook or Teams.

OpenAI's nascent strength in the enterprise market is giving its partner and biggest investor indigestion. Microsoft salespeople describe being caught flatfooted at a time when they're under pressure to get Copilot into as many customers' hands as possible.

The behind-the-scenes dogfight is complicating an already fraught relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI.