OpenAI’s new $4B consulting venture lands squarely in HR territory

Oh, how the mighty have fallen — or rather, pivoted to consulting. OpenAI, once the nonprofit champion of safe AGI and imminently human-level intelligence, has launched a $4B consulting venture called the OpenAI Deployment Company and acquired a startup called Tomoro that nobody had heard of until this morning's press release. CFO Sarah Friar cheerfully announced they'll "embed frontier AI engineers directly within organizations," which is corporate-speak for "your HR department is about to be colonised by people who say 'I'm here to help you 10x' while expensing lobster dinners and explaining what an LLM is."

Now, let's be fair: this is a brilliant business move. Why sell the shovels when you can sell the miners themselves? For a mere $4B, OpenAI becomes the McKinsey of machine learning, except with more compute and less soul. But there's a delicious irony here: the company that promised to automate everything is now deploying armies of human engineers into enterprise org charts. It's almost as if they've realised that their models still can't navigate corporate bureaucracy without accidentally violating three employment laws. The Tomoro acquisition is supposed to bring "AI deployment expertise," which is the consulting equivalent of buying a GPS because you keep getting lost on your own block — except this GPS costs four billion dollars and comes with a hoodie.

So what does this mean for HR professionals? According to HR Executive, the venture "lands squarely in HR territory." That's one way to put it. Another way: OpenAI is sending in the consultants to tell you how AI will replace half your workforce, but they're charging $4B for the privilege of being told by real humans instead of a chatbot. At least when the AI does it, it's cheaper, more accurate, and doesn't make passive-aggressive comments about your open-plan office. But don't worry: Sarah Friar assures us these engineers will "embed" themselves. That's one word for it.