OpenAI told the world about its internal workplace tools last week, and since then, the market has been freaking out about whether the AI startup will someday compete with the SaaS industry with its own software tools.
So, at OpenAI’s big DevDay conference on Monday, I headed straight to a presentation by Scotty Huhn, who is part of a team that builds tools that help OpenAI’s Sales, Customer Success, and Operations teams do their jobs more effectively.
Huhn walked a packed crowd through three OpenAI software tools: GTM Assistant, OpenHouse, and Support Agent.
He made clear these are internal tools at the moment, but after the presentation he was asked whether OpenAI would ever release them as software products in the future. He mostly the dodged the question by saying it is still very early days.
OpenAI wouldn’t be the first company to start selling the internal tools it develops to other businesses. Famously, workplace chat giant Slack used to be a game developer called Tiny Speck, and spun out its messaging tool into a full-fledged business (Salesforce bought Slack for nearly $30 billion in 2020).
Huhn also noted in his presentation, and in comments afterwards, that OpenAI is open-minded about build-versus-buy decisions when it comes to workplace software. If there are better tools out there to buy, OpenAI will do that, he said.
Huhn also noted that OpenAI uses Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s customer-relationship-management software, as a “source of truth” for the startup’s sales teams. OpenAI also uses Workday for HR information, Slack for internal communication, and Databricks for a key data warehousing service, according to his presentation and comments.
GTM Assistant
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The first internal tool Huhn described was OpenAI’s GTM Assistant, which helps the startup’s go-to-market sales team work more efficiently.
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He said some of the skills that were distilled for this tool came from a talented human sales employee called Sophie.
The tool helps staff with planning for meeting potential clients, customer demos, and follow-ups after these touchpoints.
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Another real human employee at OpenAI had developed about 100 customer demos, and the startup used these to train its GTM Assistant tool to create better demos. Now, this knowledge has been spread among the broader team, which numbers more than 400, Huhn explained.
Any missing stuff can be called out by employees and fed back into the system, constantly improving it, he added.
OpenHouse
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Next up was OpenHouse, an internal HR tool that taps into existing workplace software, such as Slack and Workday, to help employees connect with each other better and keep up with company policies and other information.
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In one example, Huhn shared a recent sales trip to New York. He used OpenHouse to ask if any colleagues there knew about customers and topic areas relevant to his upcoming meetings.
OpenHouse suggested four or five staffers, and Huhn reached out to a specific person who helped him prepare better.
Support Agent
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The final tool Huhn discussed was Support Agent, which makes OpenAI’s customer support operation more efficient.
He showed a chart of customer support tickets over the past year or so, with a huge spike in the spring when OpenAI introduced a new image-generation tool, and usage spiked. Interestingly, there was another huge spike in recent weeks, per the chart.
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The tool has improved OpenAI’s support ticket deflection rate, which measures how many customer requests are dealt with quickly and easily.
More customer questions have been solved, and positive reviews are way up, according to data Huhn shared during the presentation.
The tool has helped OpenAI bake standards and knowledge into its customer support operation, partly by taking interactions and feeding them back into evaluation processes at the end, which improves the system over time.
“Find your Sophie”
Huhn finished by pitching the audience on using AI in general to improve their own operations.
Rather than selling these specific internal tools, he encouraged developers to use OpenAI’s AgentKit service to build their own agents.
He stressed that the skills OpenAI distilled into its own AI tools ultimately came from the startup’s employees, including that talented sales staffer, Sophie.
“Find your Sophie,” Huhn said.
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