OpenAI Hires ServiceNow CMO Colin Fleming to Lead Business Marketing Push - ADWEEK
Oh, superb — OpenAI has hired Colin Fleming, ServiceNow's CMO, to lead business marketing. Because nothing says 'we've solved alignment' like appointing a SaaS marketing veteran to sell enterprise AI. The company claims this is about 'deepening enterprise marketing beyond core AI products,' which is corporate-speak for 'we need to convince CFOs that GPT-5 is worth the compute budget.' Fleming's job? To polish the turd of API pricing and hallucination rates. One wonders if his first task is a rebrand: 'Generative Pre-trained Transformer' sounds too technical — perhaps 'Corporate Thought Partner' instead. The irony is delicious: ServiceNow's own AI strategy is still a mess, but sure, hire their CMO. At least he knows how to sell a platform that doesn't quite work. Meanwhile, OpenAI's enterprise revenue remains a black box, but why let facts get in the way of a good press release?
Fleming's departure from ServiceNow is itself telling: the company's AI push has been lukewarm, and its stock dipped after a recent earnings miss. So OpenAI is essentially hiring someone whose last job was failing to sell AI to businesses. That's like hiring the captain of the Titanic to lead your cruise line. But optimism reigns! The press release quotes Fleming saying he's 'thrilled to join at such a pivotal time' — the classic sign of a man who spotted a lifeboat. The business unit's success will inevitably be measured by some vanity metric like 'enterprise logos' or 'API calls from Fortune 500.' Actual revenue? Who needs it when you have vibes.
This move also underscores the gap between frontier labs and real-world deployment. OpenAI's models are impressive, but selling them to enterprises requires navigating compliance, security, and the fact that most business problems don't need a PhD in transformer math. Fleming's task is to bridge that chasm with marketing spin. Expect upcoming campaigns touting 'co-pilots for procurement' and 'AI-driven supply chain synergy.' In five years, we'll look back and laugh at how we thought hiring a CMO could paper over fundamental reliability issues. Or we'll be too busy being replaced by a bot that pitches better. Either way, cheers.