‘When I think about the market opportunity for partners, we’ve reached 10 million weekly active users across Codex and ChatGPT Work. So that really talks to the scale that we’re seeing across the market,’ says OpenAI’s Jason Adae, who recently left AWS to join the AI star.
OpenAI is now giving channel partners significant sales and customer opportunities around Codex, ChatGPT Work and AWS Bedrock as the OpenAI Partner Network opens its doors to AI solution providers of all shapes and sizes.
“When I think about the market opportunity for partners, we’ve reached 10 million weekly active users across Codex and ChatGPT Work. So that really talks to the scale that we’re seeing across the market,” said Jason Adae, a former AWS executive who is now OpenAI’s new director of AWS partnerships in EMEA.
“Knowledge workers now make up about 20 percent of Codex users. And we’re seeing huge adoption and demand for control for Codex across the board,” he said.
‘Significant’ OpenAI And AWS Opportunity
Adae spent the last eight years at AWS working in top EMEA roles including head of partner sales for the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as AWS’ EMEA technology partner sales leader.
He was hired by OpenAI last month with the responsibility for building out the AWS go-to-market with OpenAI in the enterprise space.
“So our larger customer base is now starting to shift from single product use cases to more agentic workflow automation across their businesses,” Adae told CRN. “The intersect point really with AWS is the Bedrock opportunity.
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“The opportunity for partners to help customers adopt OpenAI technologies at pace via Bedrock is significant,” he said. “And it’s not just on the services piece. It’s what partners bring in terms of strategic direction, industry depth and knowledge, technology integrations.”
‘Phenomenal’ OpenAI Partner Network Goes Live; OpenAI’s $852 Billion Market Valuation
San Francisco-based OpenAI’s market valuation is around $852 billion after closing a $122 billion funding round in March.
In July, the AI superstar launched its inaugural partner program, the OpenAI Partner Network. The program included an up-front $150 million channel investment from OpenAI.
“The level of investment that we’ve put into the newly launched OpenAI Partner Network is phenomenal. So we made a $150 million investment across our partner ecosystem, with the ambition to train 300,000 professionals and get them certified as consultants by the end of the year—a very lofty ambition, but one that we feel as an organization is very achievable,” Adae said.
“For partners, the opportunity to help customers adopt AI at scale is very clear,” he added.
In an interview with CRN, Adae explained the partner opportunity with AWS and OpenAI, what the OpenAI Partner Network brings to the channel, why he left AWS for OpenAI and much more.
OpenAI has hired some of the cloud world’s biggest partner leaders, like OpenAI’s new partner programs leader, Colleen Kapase (pictured), from Google Cloud, as well as yourself from AWS. What won you over to OpenAI from AWS?
I see OpenAI as a significant opportunity for partners and also for myself personally.
Reflecting on my time at AWS, I had an incredible eight years. I was privileged to run partner sales functions across the U.K. and Ireland, working very closely with the advisories, the GSIs, technology partners like Snowflake and Databricks, selling into our largest enterprises. I’m forever grateful.
For me, the real attraction of OpenAI in the market is, one, the level of depth around the frontier intelligence and the incredibly smart capable people we have here. It’s an absolute pleasure to come in day-in and day-out and share corridors and conversations with highly talented, highly capable colleagues and that’s one benefit I don’t take lightly.
The second thing, you’ve seen our investment not only in the OpenAI Partner Network—the $150 million—but also our investment into helping customers become more AI proficient, more AI literate, and democratizing AI and giving them access to platforms in a very secure and compliant way. That is something that appeals to me.
The third thing, often under-indexed on, is our distribution.
ChatGPT has nearly 1 billion average weekly users; that’s phenomenal. Also more than 5 million developers in over 200 countries who are built on the API. You get a real sense of how large and how scalable we are as an organization.
For me as a technology leader, that has a real appeal to it. It’s just a pleasure to be here in this incredible organization, helping me be at the cusp of AI transformation and the cutting edge of innovation.
What is the big OpenAI opportunity for partners and AI solution providers?
The opportunity for partners to help customers adopt OpenAI technologies at pace via Bedrock is significant. And it’s not just on the services piece. It’s what partners bring in terms of strategic direction, industry depth and knowledge, technology integrations.
You think about the amount of systems that will have to power these agents. Having a consulting partner who has all those capabilities and who has the experience of dealing with different technologies is critical.
It’s non-negotiable for so many enterprises. That’s a big opportunity for partners.
What would you do right now if you were an AWS partner?
If I was an AWS partner, the first thing I [would] do is to sign up to the OpenAI Partner Network if they haven’t done so already.
We launched that a few weeks ago with major announcements across a number of different mutual AWS partners: Accenture, McKinsey, Slalom, to name a few, have all committed up front to investing in their teams and investing in leveling up on OpenAI technologies.
The second thing is thinking about how you quickly scale and navigate across our partner path, just making sure that you’re very proficient around OpenAI technologies by adopting those technologies yourself. I think that’s incredibly important, especially when customers are looking for strategic direction, that they feel the confident in the consulting partner they’re dealing with has a level of credibility, i.e., can talk to the technology that they’re delivering and serving.
The third thing, and this has always been true to my kind of partnership leadership roles, is just do the basics well. Show up with transparency. Engage early with the OpenAI and AWS teams. Ask the right questions into the customers. Co-sell with velocity and sharing of opportunities, bi-directional sharing of information.
We’re really scaling in EMEA. So the opportunity is huge.
If I’m an AWS partner or an AI solution provider, why should I join this new OpenAI Partner Network?
The level of investment that we’ve put into the newly launched OpenAI Partner Network is phenomenal.
So we made a $150 million investment across our partner ecosystem, with the ambition to train 300,000 professionals and get them certified as consultants by the end of the year—a very lofty ambition, but one that we feel as an organization is very achievable.
For partners, the opportunity to help customers adopt AI at scale is very clear.
If I reflect back on my time at AWS, some of those incredible partners that I worked with—the likes of Accenture and PwC and Slalom—they’re all building out AI practices, not only to help with implementation and delivery of these technologies, but also to help CEOs, CFOs and CIOs really understand the next wave of reimagination across HR, finance and technology divisions.
So partners have a huge opportunity to lean in to our investment.
They’re very quickly ramping up in their certification and understanding of technologies like our GPT-5.6 models as well as Codex.
In EMEA, where we’re very much at the start of AI agentic workflow adoption, there’s really a significant shift in how these cloud consultancies, global system integrators and advisories are starting to think about future growth. And we’re really excited about that at OpenAI.
OpenAI’s Codex is very popular. What can an OpenAI partner get out of Codex?
I love Codex personally. I use it daily in my life. I’m a big believer in understanding the technology that you take to market into your partners and customers. It’s helped me be so productive—from organizing tasks to building applications around analytics dashboards.
When I think about the market opportunity for partners, we’ve reached 10 million weekly active users across Codex and ChatGPT Work. So that really talks to the scale that we’re seeing across the market.
Knowledge workers now make up about 20 percent of Codex users. And we’re seeing huge adoption and demand for control for Codex across the board.
It’s a hot area—the developer experience and helping people be more productive in that space.
If you’re an organization that has been talking to enterprises, digital natives, who are used to shipping at scale, Codex should really be top of mind for you because the demand and the surge and the interest around that product is absolutely massive. We can see that in all of the data points that we measure across the business.
Talk about your new role at OpenAI. How are you trying to elevate OpenAI to the EMEA channel ecosystem?
My role specifically is around building out the AWS go-to-market with OpenAI in the enterprise space. So our larger customer base is now starting to shift from single product use cases to more agentic workflow automation across their businesses.
The intersect point really with AWS is the Bedrock opportunity.
We know Bedrock as a surface for our customers and partners is critical. Bedrock has for some time now been the kind of priming place in which our customers and partners want to do business. It’s very familiar with our customers and partners, and we’ll continue to support [it] alongside AWS customers who are adopting our OpenAI technologies through those platforms.
The second exciting [thing] for me is activating the channel around some of the broader use cases that we’re seeing. So some great customer examples of how organizations like ARM are using some of the Codex and cyber capabilities.
We had Virgin Atlantic, [which is] refactoring code bases and reducing timelines from two weeks to 30 minutes.
You think about some of the use cases that we’re seeing proliferating across our enterprises—from development and engineering to some of the cyber capabilities, as well as understanding end customers and being more targeted around hyper personalization, etc. There’s a real opportunity for AWS and OpenAI mutual partners to not only lean in to the investment we made but also lean in to support our customers to adopt, at pace, AI technologies.
We’re super excited about helping shape that with our mutual partners.
What does the motto ‘Better Together’ mean for OpenAI and AWS?
So AWS brings comprehensive and robust infrastructure, the security compliance, and the guardrails of Bedrock.
OpenAI is really bringing the intelligence around the models.
The opportunity for partners is really helping those customers understand how to integrate, how to implement that base, how to build those contextual and semantic layers to maximize productivity, and enhance and enrich day-to-day operations.
What’s in it for a partner? Helping them advise, helping them consult, helping them deliver.
But really the points of the ‘Better Together’ view is the infrastructure capability that AWS brings, and the frontier intelligence along with the infrastructure strength that OpenAI has—as well as the distribution channels that we have available around consumers—that’s a very strong compelling story for our partners to take to market into our joint customers and clients.
