What OpenAI customers should do amid potential staff mutiny: ‘Plan for the risks’

OpenAI, the organization at the center of the dayslong boardroom drama over its ouster of CEO Sam Altman, has quite an impressive roster of A-list clients. Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley, an early AI adopter, uses OpenAI's technology for a chatbot that assists wealth managers' research. Then there's payments company Stripe, which uses OpenAI's tech to combat fraud, and Iceland's government, which uses it to help quickly translate foreign language websites into Icelandic in an effort to protect its language.

But with some 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees threatening to quit if Altman, who has inspired a cult-like devotion among his troops and fellow tech executives, is not reinstated, it's advisable, even imperative, for customers to have contingency plans. After all, an OpenAI depleted of so many employees and lacking its visionary leader at the helm might be unable to reliably offer its services and develop new, secure products. Not surprisingly, rivals have begun making overtures to poach unhappy OpenAI workers. On Monday afternoon, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on X, formerly Twitter, that his company would match the compensation of any OpenAI worker who defects.

The Information reported on Monday that many OpenAI customers are now seeking alternatives. That includes some 100 clients that have reportedly approached the AI startup Anthropic, which has raised billions from both Amazon's AWS unit and Google. Others have contacted Google Cloud and Cohere. These rivals, as well as Microsoft's Azure cloud service, are not sitting idly by, with AWS going so far as to set up a team to answer queries from OpenAI customers, according to The Information.

When asked for a comment about potential customer defections, an OpenAI spokeswoman pointed Fortune to a Monday post on X in which its operations chief, Brad Lightcap, wrote, "Our customers remain our top priority. Our products and platform are operational and secure, and our engineering, support, and GTM teams will continue working around the clock to support you."

The ceaseless turmoil around business continuity could be rendered moot if Altman and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, return to OpenAI, which Bloomberg reported on Tuesday is being discussed with the company's board. Microsoft, which has a 49% stake in OpenAI worth $13 billion, has said it's open to that possibility even as it announced the creation of an AI research center under Altman's lead. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Bloomberg that, one way or another, his company would continue to work closely with Altman to keep developing the technology that the tech giant has bet its future on.

Still, it behooves companies to never allow themselves to be overly reliant on one company and certainly not one whose fortunes are so intertwined with its CEO as OpenAI is. Well before the leadership saga at Open AI, Morgan Stanley had planned to shift to Microsoft's services, according to The Information. While it's not typical for a CEO's departure to jeopardize an entire company's operations, it still must be part of the risk management calculus.

"Most organizations that have critical supplier or buyer relationships are going to plan for the risks if that relationship ruptures," says Alexander Kirss, a senior principal of research at Gartner, who covers CEOs. "It is rare for an organization to specifically build in CEO succession risk into a contract, but it's certainly something that they should account for in their planning."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com