Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…OpenAI’s first commercial hire takes a VC role…Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin…In a new ‘acquihire,’ Google nabs top talent from voice AI startup Hume…OpenAI announces company reorganization with form er Thinking Machines cofounder Barret Zeph overseeing enterprise push. When Aliisa Rosenthal began her role as OpenAI’s head of sales in June 2022, the company’s first commercial hire, there were only a couple of sales reps—and not much to sell. She wasn’t even sure the company would find the right product-market fit to launch successful commercial products. ChatGPT, of course, arrived six months later. Almost overnight, OpenAI went from a research lab with a developer audience to one of the most recognizable companies in the world. Rosenthal spent much of the rest of her time there growing her team as fast as she could, ultimately overseeing a go-to-market organization of more than 300 people. As the company grew, however, Rosenthal realized she was ready to go small again—this time in the world of venture capital. After taking a break this summer, she announced this week that she has joined Acrew Capital as a general partner, helping its companies “navigate pricing, GTM, AI-native sales, and the commercial decisions that determine what actually scales.”  “OpenAI was one of the most inspiring companies I’ve ever been a part of,” she said. “But as the company and my team grew, my work really shifted away from the research and the technical problem-solving that energized me.” By the time she left, she noted, the sales team was physically in a different building from product and engineering. “I found myself missing that proximity with builders and experiments and hard technical decisions,” she said. “I wanted to realign my work with that passion.” When I spoke with Rosenthal in early 2024, she described that passion as deeply tied to OpenAI’s mission of distributing the benefits of safe artificial general intelligence—what the company defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” At the time, she said she saw her team as less about making money and more as “AGI sherpas” (complete with a special sherpa emoji used internally), helping customers and users navigate a once-in-a-generation technological shift. I asked whether she still sees herself that way. “Honestly, I do,” she said. “The thing about everyone selling an AI product right now is you’re not just selling a tool. You’re selling a brand new technology that is scary, that’s different, that people don’t understand.” That means overcoming fear and uncertainty, she explained. “Almost half of the sale is getting your buyers and users comfortable with: ‘What is happening under the hood?’ ‘What’s happening to my data?’ ‘Can I trust the system?’” After meeting with thousands of companies while at OpenAI, Rosenthal says she’s now ready to help founders navigate that new AI buying process. And she believes there is still enormous room for startups to succeed—even in an era dominated by behemoths like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Big Tech giants like Google. “There is so much opportunity in enterprise applications—the green space is so large,” she said. “Yes, OpenAI will go after some of it. I don’t think OpenAI can go after all of it. OpenAI is both a consumer and an enterprise company. It’s unlikely they can really cover the entire enterprise application ecosystem.” She points to her earliest days at OpenAI as evidence of how much of the landscape remains up for grabs. “When I joined, it was really just developers using our product. It was hard to navigate,” she recalled. “In my second week, I sat down with our COO, Brad Lightcap, and I said, ‘Why don’t we have an application?’ And his response was, ‘Should we?’” Six months later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT—and everything changed. “It was fascinating to see how that shifted OpenAI into something the C-suite could understand,” she said. “I’m really bought into the idea of making AI understandable. I’m very bought into the application layer. The more we can make this technology approachable and navigable, the more it will be adopted—and the more successful companies will be.” With that, here’s more AI news. Sharon [email protected] @sharongoldman This story was originally featured on Fortune.com ...read more read less