OpenAI is working with a slew of consulting firms, including Accenture, Capgemini and PricewaterhouseCoopers, to help sell its artificial-intelligence coding tool Codex to businesses.
Also on Tuesday, OpenAI said it reached four million weekly active Codex users, up from three million just two weeks ago. The AI company said it had more than two million users last month.
The new Codex consulting program is part of OpenAI’s push to focus on coding and enterprise businesses as it cuts back on “side quests.”
The ChatGPT maker has been locked in a heated battle with rival Anthropic to win over corporate clients and developers. Anthropic has become a dominant AI provider for businesses due in part to the viral success of its coding and AI agent products. (Anthropic recently quietly pulled Claude Code from its Pro tier, while OpenAI has vowed to keep Codex free.)
OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said in an interview that its Codex consulting partners will help OpenAI expand its reach to more potential enterprise customers than it could alone.
“Helping companies bridge that gap between how to use it, how to expand it and how to move even more quickly is part of our responsibility, and these partnerships are going to allow us to help scale that to the world,” Dresser said.
OpenAI declined to specify the financial terms behind its latest partnership program.
The company said Tuesday that it has hired Colleen Kapase as its new vice president of global partnerships and ecosystem, reporting to Dresser. Kapase, who joins from Google’s cloud unit, will oversee OpenAI’s Codex consulting partners.
Beyond using Codex to assist customers with tasks such as updating code, OpenAI’s consulting partners will help bring Codex “into every single line of business,” Dresser said. That includes areas of knowledge work like marketing, finance and sales, where coding agents and tools aren’t currently as prevalent.
Dresser said Codex and Frontier—the OpenAI platform launched in February to help businesses develop AI agents—are together aimed at helping automate aspects of all knowledge work.
As an example of how Codex can be useful outside of software development, Dresser said she herself has a Codex-built AI agent called “Chief,” which summarizes meetings, writes notes and can update Salesforce and various Slack channels.
OpenAI’s Codex consulting partners will also get access to the AI coding tool as part of the program. OpenAI already has existing partnerships with consulting firms like Bain & Co and PwC to help sell and use ChatGPT Enterprise, the version of its chatbot aimed at large companies.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have used consulting firms as a tactic to help spread the adoption of AI and agents throughout the business world. Anthropic, which hasn’t publicly shared how many people are using Claude Code, said in February that the number of weekly active users for its AI coding assistant had doubled since Jan. 1.
Dresser said OpenAI is also working with its Codex consulting partners to build up Codex Labs, an initiative that brings “hands-on workshops” to businesses to help them start using the coding tool.
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