While OpenAI’s anticipated IPO is an important milestone for the AI market, enterprises need to pay attention to how its IPO and those of competitors such as Anthropic and SpaceX affect AI pricing and market strategy.
The AI lab filed an S-1 with the SEC on June 8. The confidential filing means that, for now, the financial details are private. However, the move comes after OpenAI’s private valuation rose to $852 billion in March.
The ChatGPT creator’s filing follows Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing on June 1 and comes as many expect Elon Musk’ SpaceX, parent company of xAI, to go public as soon as this week. With all these AI companies going public, the AI market is shifting, with innovation moving from private to largely public financing. For businesses and customers of these AI labs, the implications could include changes in pricing and vendor discipline.
“As these companies move toward public markets, public investors will demand clearer paths to profitability, operating discipline and margin expansion,” said Kashyap Kompella, CEO and founder of RPA2AI Research. “That means pricing is likely to be rationalized over time.”
A Changing Market
Businesses need to consider the possible changing price tag of AI applications they are considering.
“They should bake in potential price increases, usage-based billing changes and higher costs for premium models, compliance features, data controls and enterprise-grade support,” Kompella said. “This will affect AI use cases enterprises pursue.”
He added that high-value use cases such as software development, customer support automation and sales productivity could justify the investment businesses make in AI. At the same time, low-value experimentation may get cut.
Enterprises also need to realize that the era of AI chatbots is over, said Nick Patience, an analyst at Futurum Group.
“The chatbot is not the answer to everything,” Patience said. “Agentic AI is coming, is here already to a certain extent. “It’d just be key as to how [OpenAI] use the capital to invest in that.”
OpenAI’s Challenges
In the case of OpenAI, profitability could become even more important for investors because the AI lab is projected to lose $14 billion this year. The vendor does not expect to turn a profit until 2029 or 2030.
“The challenge for them is going to be the exposure that [the IPO] gives them in terms of how they’re burning capital and when they’re going to get a return on that,” Patience said. “If the profitability is not scheduled for an annual basis for another 3 1/2 years, that’s quite a long runway.”
Investors will also be looking to see whether OpenAI’s revenue is growing faster than its compute and infrastructure costs, Kompella said.
“In traditional software, incremental usage often has very high gross margin,” he said. “In frontier AI, that assumption is weaker because every query, agent task, image, video or coding workflow consumes meaningful compute.”
Therefore, investors will pay attention to whether OpenAI can improve its margins through “model efficiency, pricing discipline, enterprise mix shift, infrastructure optimization and possibly custom chips or preferential cloud terms,” he added.
Another challenge for OpenAI is its complicated business structure. Its IPO filing comes after it completed its transition from a nonprofit to a commercial public benefit corporation. The new model means that while OpenAI is no longer bound to its nonprofit mission, the nonprofit group still owns 26% of the company and has the ability to fire board members and voting power if an AI model becomes dangerous.
“The structure of the company is highly unusual,” Patience said, adding that the nonprofit’s ability to appoint and remove board members will lead to scrutiny from investors.
“What happens when the mission of the OpenAI foundation diverges from what Wall Street wants it to do, which is to maximize shareholder value? Anthropic has not got that situation,” he said. “SpaceX has not got that situation.”
