Sometimes you light so much cash on fire that you burn the whole house down.
OpenAI and Instacart are launching a grocery shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, allowing customers to brainstorm meal ideas, make a grocery list, and check out, all without leaving the chat interface.
This builds upon an existing partnership between OpenAI and Instacart; more than two years ago, Instacart launched an in-app AI search tool powered by ChatGPT, which helps shoppers ask questions about what to make for dinner or how to accommodate dietary restrictions.
The relationship between OpenAI and Instacart seems to have only deepened after former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo — who was already an OpenAI board member — joined the company as the CEO of Applications in May.
Agentic commerce — the use of AI tools to do shopping research and make purchases on a user’s behalf — is a current priority for OpenAI. Its most recent dev day focused on its plan to build apps into ChatGPT. In an early preview for developers, ChatGPT launched integrations with apps like Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow; since then, OpenAI has announced further partnerships with Target, Intuit, and others.
Leading up to this year’s holiday shopping season, both OpenAI and Perplexity announced in-app features that help users make decisions about what products to buy — so, you could ask ChatGPT to help you find the best deal on a gaming laptop that matches your specific criteria. Adobe predicted that AI-assisted online shopping will grow by 520% this holiday season.
Despite ChatGPT’s immense popularity, OpenAI is not making a profit, and it may not for another several years — if it ever does. Its products are so resource-intensive that even subscription costs don’t account for how much compute power the company uses to make its product work. These agentic commerce tools could give OpenAI another way of making money, since it’ll take an undisclosed “small fee” when it helps merchants make a sale. But it would take a whole lot of ChatGPT-based shopping for these fees to make a dent in OpenAI’s debt.
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OpenAI released new data Monday showing enterprise usage of its AI tools has surged dramatically over the past year, with ChatGPT message volume growing 8x since November 2024 and workers reporting they’re saving up to an hour daily. The findings arrive a week after CEO Sam Altman sent an internal “code red” memo about the competitive threat of Google.
The timing underscores OpenAI’s push to reframe its position as the enterprise AI leader, even as it faces mounting pressures. While close to 36% of U.S. businesses are ChatGPT Enterprise customers compared to 14.3% for Anthropic, per Ramp AI Index, the majority of OpenAI’s revenue still comes from consumer subscriptions — a base that’s being threatened by Google’s Gemini. OpenAI also must compete against rival AI firm Anthropic — whose revenue comes mainly from B2B sales – and, increasingly, open-weight model providers for enterprise customers.
The AI giant has committed $1.4 trillion to infrastructure commitments over the next few years, making enterprise growth essential to its business model.
“If you think about it from an economic growth perspective, consumers really matter,” Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, said during a briefing. “But when you look at historically transformative technologies like the steam engine, it’s when firms adopt and scale these technologies that you really see the biggest economic benefits.”
OpenAI’s new findings suggest that adoption among larger enterprises is not only growing but becoming more integrated into workflows. Employees aren’t only sending more messages — organizations using OpenAI’s API (its developer interface) are consuming 320 times more “reasoning tokens” than they were a year ago, suggesting companies are using AI for more complex problem-solving. That, or they are experimenting heavily with the new tech and burning through tokens, without necessarily getting long-term value.
That increase in reasoning tokens, which correlates with increased energy usage, could be expensive for companies and therefore not sustainable in the long term. TechCrunch has asked OpenAI about enterprise budget allocation for AI and the sustainability of this growth rate.
Beyond raw usage metrics, OpenAI is also seeing changes in how companies deploy its tools. Use of custom GPTs — which companies use to codify institutional knowledge into assistants or automate workflows — jumped 19x this year, now accounting for 20% of enterprise messages, the report found. OpenAI pointed to digital bank customer BBVA, which it says regularly uses over 4,000 custom GPTs.
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“It shows you how much people are really able to take this powerful technology and start to customize it to the things that are useful to them,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, during the briefing.
These integrations have led to meaningful time savings, according to OpenAI. Participants reported saving 40 to 60 minutes per day with OpenAI’s enterprise products — though that may not include time spent learning the systems, prompting, or correcting AI output.
The report found that enterprise workers are also increasingly leveraging AI tools to expand their own capabilities. Three quarters of those surveyed say AI enables them to do things, including technical tasks, they couldn’t do before. OpenAI reported a 36% increase in coding-related messages outside of engineering, IT, and research teams.
While OpenAI drove home the idea that its technology is democratizing access to skills, it’s important to note that more vibe coding could lead to more security vulnerabilities and other flaws. When asked about this, Lightcap pointed to OpenAI’s recent release of its agentic security researcher Aardvark, which is in private beta, as a potential way to detect bugs, vulnerabilities, and exploits.
OpenAI’s report also found that even the most active ChatGPT Enterprise users aren’t using the most advanced tools available to them, like data analysis, reasoning, or search. During the briefing, Lightcap mused that this was because fully adopting AI systems requires a mindset shift and deeper integration with enterprise data and processes. Adoption of advanced features will take time, he said, as companies retool workflows to better understand what’s possible.
Lightcap and Chatterji also stressed a report finding that showed a “growing divide in AI adoption,” with some “frontier” workers using more tools more often to save more time than the “laggards.”
“There are firms that still very much see these systems as a piece of software, something I can buy and give to my teams and that’s kind of the end of it,” Lightcap said. “And then there are companies that are really starting to embrace it, almost more like an operating system. It’s basically a re-platforming of a lot of the company’s operations.”
OpenAI’s leadership — which certainly feels the pressure of the firm’s $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments — framed this as an opportunity for laggards to catch up. For workers training AI systems to replicate their work, “catching up” might feel more like a countdown.
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While OpenAI continues to insist that there are currently no ads — or tests for advertising — live in ChatGPT, the company’s chief research officer Mark Chen also acknowledged that the company “fell short” with recent promotional messages and is working to improve the experience.
Chen and other OpenAI executives were responding to posts from ChatGPT’s paying subscribers who complained about seeing promotional messages for companies like Peloton and Target.
In response, the company said it was only testing ways to show apps built on the ChatGPT app platform that it announced in October, with “no financial component” to those suggestions. (One of the users who’d complained initially about the ads responded skeptically, writing, “Bruhhh… Don’t insult your paying users.”)
Similarly, ChatGPT head Nick Turley posted Friday that he was “seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT.”
“There are no live tests for ads – any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads,” Turley wrote. “If we do pursue ads, we’ll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.”
Earlier that same day, however, Chen responded in a more apologetic tone, acknowledging that the controversy isn’t just a matter of user confusion.
“I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care, and we fell short,” he wrote. “We’ve turned off this kind of suggestion while we improve the model’s precision. We’re also looking at better controls so you can dial this down or off if you don’t find it helpful.”
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Earlier this year, former Instacart and Facebook executive Fidji Sumo joined OpenAI as CEO of Applications and was widely expected to build up the company’s advertising business. However, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that a recent memo from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red,” prioritizing work to improve the quality of ChatGPT and pushing back other products including advertising.
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ChatGPT’s growth is starting to taper off, according to new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Today, the OpenAI-owned AI chatbot remains the leader in the space, accounting for 50% of global downloads on mobile devices and 55% of the global monthly active users. However, Google’s Gemini has begun to outpace ChatGPT in terms of download growth, growth of monthly active users, and growth of time spent in app, the firm found.
Over time, that increased pace of adoption could help Gemini narrow the gap with ChatGPT. That’s something OpenAI is now worried about, as its recent “code red” memo indicated. The missive, penned by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, instructed staff to focus on improving the company’s AI products, particularly in areas like personalization, reliability, image generation, and more.
When looking at the recent data, it’s clear the race is not over yet: Both ChatGPT and Gemini continue to see sizable growth.
ChatGPT has seen its global monthly active users climb by 180% year-over-year as of November 2025, while Gemini’s monthly active users are up 170%.
But the new data indicates that ChatGPT’s global monthly active users only grew by around 6% from August to November, to reach roughly 810 million. (The monthly active user numbers in the above chart are rounded, the firm notes.) This figure could suggest the AI chatbot is nearing market saturation, Sensor Tower says.
Meanwhile, Google Gemini’s global monthly active users jumped by around 30% during the same time frame, as the release of its new image generation model, Nano Banana, drove increased adoption.
In addition, the report noted that around two times more U.S. Android users now engage with Gemini directly through the Android operating system compared with using the standalone Gemini mobile app. This could provide Google with a competitive advantage in the global market, where Android dominates, as it means Gemini isn’t constrained to only being used within a mobile app or web interface.
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Gemini is also increasing its share of the overall AI chatbot market when compared across all top apps like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok. Over the past seven months (May-November 2025), Gemini increased its share of global monthly active users by three percentage points, the firm estimates.
But ChatGPT saw its share of global monthly active users drop three percentage points over the past four months (August-November 2025), by comparison.
Challenges from Perplexity and Claude may also be impacting ChatGPT, as both rivals saw triple-digit growth for their respective chatbots in 2025, with the former up 370% year-over-year, and the latter up 190%.
ChatGPT also saw its global downloads grow by 85% year-over-year as of November, but this lagged the overall cohort’s average growth of 110%.
Perplexity and Gemini saw the largest growth, up 215% and 190% year-over-year, respectively.
Finally, Gemini app users’ time spent in the app has more than doubled over the past few months, Sensor Tower said. As of November, Gemini users were spending 11 minutes per day in the app, up 120% from March. This is likely due to the popularity of its image generation model, Nano Banana, in September.
ChatGPT’s users’ daily time spent only increased by 6% during the same time frame. Plus, ChatGPT users’ time spent was down 10% in November, compared with July.
While the current data indicates Google could be catching up with the market leader, much of its recent gains have to do with the success of Nano Banana. OpenAI could speed up growth again with the release of its own new products, if they make a similar impact.
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If Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent tech conference proves anything, it’s that the cloud infrastructure player is going all in on AI.
AWS announced made dozens of announcements from new AI agents and updated large language models, to products with LLM and agent-building capabilities. AI for enterprise was everywhere. But are its customers just as eager?
AWS CEO Matt Garman acknowledged during his keynote that enterprises haven’t seen a return on AI investment yet. He thinks that’s about to change — and fast.
“I believe that the advent of AI agents has brought us to an inflection point in AI’s trajectory,” Garman said. “It’s turning from a technical wonder into something that delivers us real value. This change is going to have as much impact on your business as the internet or the cloud.”
While analysts told TechCrunch they were impressed by some of AWS’ tech announcements this week, they aren’t sure it’s enough to move the needle on enterprise AI adoption or change AWS’ position in the AI race.
AWS is one of the market leaders when it comes to cloud infrastructure; the same can’t be said for its enterprise AI offerings.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google hold a commanding lead when it comes to enterprise market share for actual AI models. AWS does have the advantage of having everything in house, including infrastructure and its own AI training chips.
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Naveen Chhabra, a principal analyst at Forrester, told TechCrunch over email that while AWS announced a lot of cool new technology, it doesn’t change the fact that many enterprises aren’t ready to adopt AI.
“AWS AI announcements show that AWS is thinking ahead and maybe far too ahead,” Chhabra wrote. “Most enterprises are still piloting AI projects and are rarely at the levels of maturity AWS expects them to be to take advantage of the offerings that come out of these announcements.”
A widely cited MIT study from August found that 95% of enterprises aren’t seeing a return on investment from AI.
Ethan Feller, an equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, told TechCrunch in a phone interview that the new Nova AI models, agents, and model-building capabilities weren’t what stood out to him as interesting from this week — despite these being the products AWS hyped the most. Instead, it was the infrastructure announcements.
“The AWS AI factory is really compelling,” Feller said about a new initiative that allows customers to run AWS AI in their own data centers. “AWS is a huge player in where the models are being run and is dominant in the cloud industry. I think that is where Amazon’s expertise really lies. It’s a good thing to double down on where they have expertise.”
Feller likes that AWS is looking to make a vertical AI play, but he thinks it may make more sense to do so through partnerships with other AI players like Anthropic and Nvidia as opposed to using all of their own AI technology.
Despite all of this, AWS is still well positioned to carve out market share in the AI sector, while continuing to grow its core businesses.
AWS’ position as an industry-leading cloud provider means it has a solid business foundation despite what happens in the AI market because it provides the rails for the industry’s technology — regardless of what the AI trend of the moment is.
If the AI industry ends up being the bubble some say it is, AWS, which recorded $11.4 billion in operating income in the third quarter, will likely be less affected by a negative change in AI market conditions than its peers.
This gives AWS room to experiment and iterate on what its place in the AI market could look like down the road. That’s why even if enterprises aren’t ready for the tech they release today, AWS should keep working to improve it.
Follow along with all of TechCrunch’s coverage of the annual enterprise tech event here, and see all the announcements you may have missed thus far here.
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