Does the rabbit really win the race in the enterprise?

OpenAI lit the match that started the AI economy. No question about that. The question now is: will they still be holding the torch when the race ends?

History says...maybe not. Netscape opened up the Internet. Napster cracked digital music. MySpace gave social media its first adolescence. None finished the marathon. Innovation and victory are rarely the same thing.

Right now, OpenAI is in a knife fight on several fronts.  For example:

• Meta is throwing monopoly money at talent, offering signing packages that sound like misprints.  Yet they have a market cap and cash flows which OpenAI simply can’t compete with.  

• xAI’s Grok 4 just dropped, and beneath the noise of spectacle and controversy, it’s taken pole position (for now) for model performance.

• AWS is doing what AWS does: focusing on platform infrastructure, selling shovels in a gold rush, and embedding Anthropic and agents into enterprise workflows.  

Yet, crazy question of the week: How much do (or will) Fortune 493 CEOs care about who “wins” the foundational model wars?  

Consumer adoption of GenAI models has been extraordinary.  And these platforms will soon break entirely new ground in research.  

Yet, in the enterprise, GenAI models are quickly becoming the newest utility. They’re powerful, fast-evolving, and absolutely necessary, but on their own they don’t differentiate a business. Just like in the Industrial Age, no one cared which utility powered the factory. They cared about what the factory produced.

It’s the same today. No one’s asking Ford or Sony which AI model they’re using. They care about the product, the experience, the outcome.  As such, the new battleground isn’t model performance; it’s usefulness. It’s agents + workflows + the invisible hand of customer experience. Because at the end of the day, Bank of America doesn’t need GPT-5. It needs AI that helps its customers get a mortgage without losing their minds.

OpenAI wrote the opening chapter. But the enterprise story? That’s being written higher up the stack, and the ending is far from settled.