OpenAI pairs frontier language models with tools that can act on a user's behalf — drafting content, analyzing data, writing code, researching topics, and running multi-step agent workflows. It's available through the ChatGPT app for individuals and businesses, a developer API for building custom products, and agentic tools like Codex, so the same models can power a chat assistant or sit behind an automated business process.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 in San Francisco as a research lab with a mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Co-founders included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and Elon Musk. The company launched ChatGPT in late 2022, which brought generative AI into mainstream use, and in October 2025 restructured into OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation overseen by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Sam Altman serves as CEO.

OpenAI's core capability is turning natural-language instructions into finished work. Its models write and edit long-form content, summarize and analyze documents and data, generate and review code, and call external tools and APIs mid-task rather than only returning a block of text. Through the API, teams can embed those capabilities directly into the systems they already run, from CRMs and support desks to internal knowledge bases and data pipelines.

In practice, that shows up as automated lead research and outreach drafting, CRM data enrichment and cleanup, meeting and call summarization, support triage, reporting, and workflow orchestration across a company's existing software. A revenue operations team, for example, might use OpenAI models to score and summarize inbound leads, draft personalized follow-ups, and keep CRM records current, with a human reviewing and approving the output instead of doing the manual assembly work in between.