OpenAI made a Filipino consultancy the only seller of ChatGPT Enterprise here

OpenAI has named Thinking Machines, a Philippine-founded AI and data consultancy, as an Advanced Partner and the sole reseller of ChatGPT Enterprise in the country. Any Philippine company that wants the business version of ChatGPT now buys it through them.

Thinking Machines was founded in 2015 and employs more than 150 data scientists and engineers across the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The company says it was also picked earlier as OpenAI's first service partner in the Asia Pacific region. It runs AI training programs with Mapua University, Far Eastern University and CIIT College of Arts and Technology, and recently took an investment from Temus, a Singapore firm backed by state investor Temasek.

Why it matters

The two companies say the Philippines is already among the top 15 markets in the world for ChatGPT use, and that close to 40 percent of the messages people send in the free consumer app are work related. That is a lot of Filipinos quietly using a personal account to do their job. This deal is the paid company version arriving with a local seller attached, sold to whole offices instead of one person at a time, with someone here to set it up.

By partnering with OpenAI, we are committed to facilitating the adoption of generative AI and empowering businesses across the Philippines to realize the benefits of this advanced technology.

The catch to watch

Sole reseller means one door. There is no second local seller to price against, and neither company has published what ChatGPT Enterprise costs in pesos. The other open question is whether the shift will hold. Thinking Machines itself describes Philippine organizations as only beginning to move past small, isolated pilot projects, and getting past that stage usually costs more in retraining staff than in the software licence.