The best-known AI product in the world is still being sold to large companies in person. Leila Woodington, OpenAI’s head of B2B marketing for EMEA, told a panel at Semrush Spotlight in London on 13 October that field marketing is “our strongest channel right now”, according to Adweek, which reported her remarks the same day.

Her reasoning matters more than the ranking. Almost everyone in a target account already knows ChatGPT, Woodington said, but that familiarity does not show a company how to deploy it across thousands of employees, or how to win over the several executives who approve the purchase. That gap between awareness and adoption is the one most B2B SaaS marketing teams work in every quarter. OpenAI’s answer is a familiar mix: events first, then webinars on a fixed calendar, a curated group of creators, social media and, Adweek reported, local teams in the markets it sells to.

The comments land as enterprise becomes a larger share of OpenAI’s business. In an 8 April post, the company said enterprise accounted for more than 40% of its revenue and was on track to match consumer revenue by the end of 2026. Its enterprise page now claims more than 2 million business customers.

Why does OpenAI rank field marketing above its own brand?

OpenAI ranks field marketing first because its enterprise sale turns on deployment and approval, and a famous product name answers neither. Woodington described the purchase as a complex buying decision that her team influences rather than controls, and said no single channel would persuade the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company on its own. In her account, the field event earns its place by putting those approvers in one room, with time to ask how the product would actually run inside their organisation.

The company is staffing for it. OpenAI’s careers site lists an Enterprise Field Marketer role in a Field Marketing team that sits within Enterprise Marketing, based in San Francisco or New York. The role owns programmes meant to generate pipeline, advance strategic deals and build executive relationships with priority accounts, through executive dinners, roundtables, workshops, roadshows and conference activations planned with sales and measured on business impact. The role is US-based rather than part of Woodington’s EMEA remit, and the page carries no closing date, so it shows the shape of the function rather than its size.

That shape will look familiar to field marketers at much smaller software companies. The format OpenAI describes, a small senior audience, a specific deployment question and sales in the room, is the standard enterprise playbook. What is unusual is the most recognised vendor in the category saying publicly that it still relies on it.

How does OpenAI fit a fast release cycle into a fixed marketing calendar?

OpenAI slots product launches into a predefined set of activities instead of building a new campaign for each one, Woodington said. The standing calendar includes about two webinars a month, and a selected group of creators and influencers who already use OpenAI’s products is brought in when the company ships something new.

The approach answers a problem OpenAI has made acute for itself. OpenAI ships often enough that a bespoke campaign per release would be hard to sustain. Adweek tied the calendar model to the launch of Dots, OpenAI’s always-on ChatGPT agent, at a developer conference in San Francisco the previous month, and The Marketing Helm has covered OpenAI’s Dots launch alongside a run of model and advertising releases since. A fixed calendar lets the marketing team absorb that output without rebuilding its programme every fortnight. Woodington added that the chief marketing officers she meets expect her to be fluent in every AI tool, at least within OpenAI’s own range, which turns product knowledge into part of the field team’s job.

Adweek also reported that OpenAI is building local teams in its sales markets, hiring people who know the regional languages, business cultures and trade organisations. Paid media sits alongside the field work rather than replacing it. Adweek cited Business Insider figures showing OpenAI’s sponsored Instagram posts promoting ChatGPT doubled from 61 in June to 122 in July. That is a count of posts, not a measure of reach or enterprise pipeline, and it says nothing about which channel closes business.

What does the evidence say about field marketing in complex B2B sales?

Independent research backs the logic of OpenAI’s mix, though OpenAI has published no results for it. Neither Adweek’s report nor OpenAI’s own material gives a field marketing budget, headcount, event attendance, sourced pipeline or attribution figures, so Woodington’s ranking is a practitioner’s judgement rather than a published case study.

Forrester’s Q1 2025 State of B2B Events Survey, written up by principal analyst Conrad Mills in August 2025, splits event formats by buying stage. Webinars and virtual events are the cost-effective way to educate large numbers of buyers early. Field events do their best work once buyers are evaluating solutions and moving towards a deal, and customer conferences and user groups carry the relationship after the sale. OpenAI’s described mix maps closely onto that model, with webinars for reach and field events for accounts already weighing a rollout.

The same survey found 17% of organisations had event, field, demand and sales teams running events independently of one another, and Forrester linked that fragmentation to inconsistent execution. The OpenAI listing points the other way, with field programmes planned jointly with sales and measured on business impact.

Competitors are fighting over the same buying committees. Microsoft has trained its sales force to sell against OpenAI and Anthropic, which puts OpenAI’s field team in rooms where a direct rival’s account team may already have made its case.

OpenAI expects enterprise revenue to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026, and has not said how much of that pipeline its field programme sources.