OpenAI’s New AI Consulting Service Starts at $10 Million

OpenAI has quietly entered the high-end consulting space, where the company will offer custom AI solutions starting at $10 million per engagement. However, this new service puts OpenAI in direct competition against giants like Accenture, Palantir, and IBM.

The service puts OpenAI’s forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) directly within client organizations. These engineers help adapt and integrate OpenAI’s GPT-4o models with clients’ internal systems, building tailored solutions such as intelligent chatbots and automation tools. The goal is to solve domain-specific problems that can’t be addressed with out-of-the-box AI products.

Interestingly, the company already has some clients, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Indian government, and Southeast Asia-based ride-hailing platform Grab. Reports suggest the Pentagon has signed a $200 million deal with OpenAI to build advanced AI tools for both defense and admin operations. Grab is using OpenAI’s technology to improve its roadway mapping using street-level imagery.

However, it’s also worth noting that this new service makes a big shift in OpenAI’s business model. Until now, the company has primarily relied on its API offerings and ChatGPT subscriptions. But now it’s stepping into hands-on AI deployment, OpenAI is aiming for deeper enterprise integration, long-term contracts, and direct involvement in building and refining use-case-specific AI models.

Though OpenAI continues to give regular updates to its API business as well. Recently, the company rolled out deep research models, such as o3-deep-research and o4-mini-deep-research for its API, which are designed to help users tackle complex questions and tasks by combining advanced reasoning with web search capabilities. Apart from that, OpenAI also introduced webhooks, a feature that lets apps get automatic notifications when certain events happen, making it simpler to build responsive AI-driven workflows. 

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