OpenAI may be one of the world’s most recognizable AI brands. To sell its business, its strongest marketing channel is decidedly offline.
“Field is the one I would definitely put out as our strongest channel right now,” said Leila Woodington, OpenAI’s head of B2B marketing, EMEA, during a panel at Semrush Spotlight in London today.
The reason is the gap between using ChatGPT and buying it. Most people know the product, Woodington said, but that awareness does not tell a company how to deploy it across thousands of employees, or persuade several executives who sign off on the purchase.
In-person events are one piece of a broader effort by the ChatGPT maker to explain the product to businesses. OpenAI also works with what Woodington called a “bench of really carefully curated creators and influencers who genuinely love our products,” who are brought in when the company ships something new, alongside leveraging social media.
OpenAI doubled its sponsored Instagram posts promoting ChatGPT from 61 in June to 122 in July, according to Business Insider.
“This is a complex buying decision that we’re influencing,” said Woodington. “No single one of those things is going to persuade the CEO of Fortune 500 companies to buy our technology.”
But keeping a constant brand message is its own challenge as OpenAI’s product lineup grows.
The company launched Dots, a persistent AI agent, at its developer conference in San Francisco last month alongside a plethora of tools. Instead of building a fresh campaign for each launch, Woodington’s team runs a fixed calendar, including about two webinars a month, and slots new products into it.
“We have a set of activities that are predefined, and then we plug launches into them, rather than taking every single launch and then spinning our wheels trying to figure out a way to get it to market,” she said.
The company is also building local teams in the markets it sells to, including people who understand local languages, cultures, and trade organizations.
Woodington, who previously spent more than a decade building Facebook’s B2B marketing function before working at Snap and an AI-powered video startup, joined OpenAI more than a year ago to help build its marketing operation.
“[CMOs] seem to expect that I’m completely on top of every single AI technology, at least within our own tools,” Woodington said. “[But] we are trying to keep up in the same way as others.”
