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Brand & Creative

OpenAI's Strongest Channel for Selling ChatGPT to Businesses Is In-Person Events

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State of Brand is a trade publication covering brand strategy and category positioning for CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders. We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping brand strategy, category positioning, and how brands hold meaning as media fragments, with a particular focus on perspectives from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand. Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across brand and marketing. Our goal is to give practitioners a useful place to learn from their peers and give experts a credible platform to contribute their experience to important industry conversations.

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We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover. Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their professional expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate. Interviews are designed to surface useful firsthand perspectives rather than promote a product or company. For participants, they provide an opportunity to contribute to the conversation around their field, share lessons from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best. There is no fee to participate.

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State of Brand is published by Outlever, which produces it as one of its own media properties rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor. The articles and interviews are produced by the State of Brand editorial team. Experts are invited because their perspectives are relevant to our coverage, not because they have paid to appear. An interview invitation from State of Brand should therefore be understood as an invitation to contribute expertise to an editorial trade publication — not as a sales solicitation or paid placement.

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Your interview will be published on State of Brand, where it becomes part of our ongoing coverage of brand strategy and category positioning and can continue to be discovered and referenced after publication. Our audience includes CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders at organizations around the world, including professionals at Fortune 500 companies and other leading enterprises. We also make interviews easy to extend through professional networks. Contributors receive a shareable article link and professionally designed quote-card asset that can be used on LinkedIn, and stories may receive additional amplification through the publication, contributor networks and relevant professional communities. For many contributors, the value is not simply appearing in one article. It is having their expertise captured in a credible editorial format that can be shared with colleagues, customers, peers and their broader professional network.

OpenAI's head of B2B marketing for EMEA says in-person events sell ChatGPT to businesses better than any other channel, because enterprise deals need sign-off from several executives.

ByState of Brand Editorial

Oct 27, 2026

OpenAI's EMEA head of B2B marketing says field events are the company's best channel for selling ChatGPT to businesses. Her team also fits product launches into a fixed marketing calendar instead of building a new campaign for each one.

OpenAI's strongest channel for selling ChatGPT to businesses is in-person field marketing, according to Leila Woodington, the company's head of B2B marketing for EMEA. She called field "our strongest channel right now" on a panel at Semrush Spotlight in London on Oct. 13, Adweek reported.

Woodington said knowing ChatGPT and buying it are separate problems. Most people have used it, but that doesn't tell a company how to deploy it across thousands of employees or convince the several executives who approve the purchase. She said no single channel would persuade a Fortune 500 CEO to buy.

OpenAI uses other channels as well. It works with a hand-picked group of creators and influencers when it releases something new, and Business Insider reported that its sponsored Instagram posts for ChatGPT doubled from 61 in June to 122 in July. It's also hiring local staff in the countries it sells to who know the languages and trade associations there. Woodington still ranked field first.

OpenAI already has all the awareness it needs

At State of Brand, we think more B2B marketers should pay attention to this, because OpenAI is the company least likely to need events. ChatGPT is about as well known as software gets. If brand awareness were enough to close enterprise deals, OpenAI could skip them.

Enterprise AI purchases go through a committee. The CIO, security team, finance and legal usually weigh in, and more often now the CEO does too. In a survey we covered earlier this month, 72% of CEOs said they make the AI decisions at their companies. Those people want to know where their data goes, what it costs and how employees will be trained, and they usually want a person to answer.

Woodington's career fits the pattern. She spent more than a decade at Facebook as it built its business marketing operation, then led business marketing for EMEA at Snap, according to her Marketing Academy profile. Both companies had huge consumer audiences and still had to win over corporate buyers one account at a time.

Launches go into a fixed calendar

OpenAI releases products constantly. Last month it introduced Dots, a persistent AI agent, along with several other tools at its developer conference. Woodington's team doesn't build a separate campaign for each release. It keeps a set calendar of recurring activities, including about two webinars a month, and adds each launch to whatever is already scheduled.

In a September interview with The Drum, she said OpenAI's products will keep changing faster than marketing plans can, so the team needs repeatable processes for bringing them to market.

We think this is the more useful idea for most brand teams. B2B companies often treat each launch as its own project, with new messaging, new creative and a new channel plan. Over a year, that makes a brand sound inconsistent. With a fixed calendar, the formats and timing stay the same and only the product news changes, so customers know what to expect and where to look.

OpenAI ships more often than almost anyone in software and has decided this approach is worth it. A company launching a few products a year has even less reason to start from scratch each time.

Other B2B marketers are spending more on events

Event marketing rose to 23.1% of offline budgets in Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, from 19.4% a year earlier, Chief Marketer reported. Forrester found most teams plan to add gatherings of fewer than 200 people, as we noted in our report on where B2B budgets are going in 2027.

We think AI is part of the reason. Generative tools, ChatGPT included, have made emails, posts and ebooks cheap to produce, and buyers now get far more of them than they can read. An executive who gives up an evening for a dinner or half a day for a workshop is paying closer attention than one skimming a cold email.

Woodington also said CMOs often assume she's an expert on every AI tool, or at least OpenAI's own, when her team is learning them as fast as anyone else. A set calendar helps with that too, since the team doesn't have to master each new product before it can start marketing it.

Our take

B2B marketers should stop measuring brand success by awareness alone. OpenAI has more of it than any company in its category, and it still relies on getting buyers into a room.

We'd do two things. Treat field events as part of the brand budget and run them on a regular schedule, with small groups of senior buyers. And set your recurring formats, such as a monthly webinar or a quarterly executive dinner, before the next launch so new products have somewhere to go.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is State of Brand?

State of Brand is a trade publication covering brand strategy and category positioning for CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders.

We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping brand strategy, category positioning, and how brands hold meaning as media fragments, with a particular focus on perspectives from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand.

Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across brand and marketing. Our goal is to give practitioners a useful place to learn from their peers and give experts a credible platform to contribute their experience to important industry conversations.

Who do you interview, and why was I invited?

We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover.

Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their professional expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate.

Interviews are designed to surface useful firsthand perspectives rather than promote a product or company. For participants, they provide an opportunity to contribute to the conversation around their field, share lessons from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best.

There is no fee to participate.

Who publishes State of Brand?

State of Brand is published by Outlever, which produces it as one of its own media properties rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor.

The articles and interviews are produced by the State of Brand editorial team. Experts are invited because their perspectives are relevant to our coverage, not because they have paid to appear.

An interview invitation from State of Brand should therefore be understood as an invitation to contribute expertise to an editorial trade publication — not as a sales solicitation or paid placement.

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Our editorial team invites contributors because their experience, expertise, or perspective is relevant to the subjects we cover — not because they have paid for exposure.

State of Brand is published by Outlever, which allows the publication to produce ongoing reporting and interviews without charging the experts who contribute to our coverage.

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Where will my interview appear, and who will see it?

Your interview will be published on State of Brand, where it becomes part of our ongoing coverage of brand strategy and category positioning and can continue to be discovered and referenced after publication.

Our audience includes CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders at organizations around the world, including professionals at Fortune 500 companies and other leading enterprises.

We also make interviews easy to extend through professional networks. Contributors receive a shareable article link and professionally designed quote-card asset that can be used on LinkedIn, and stories may receive additional amplification through the publication, contributor networks and relevant professional communities.

For many contributors, the value is not simply appearing in one article. It is having their expertise captured in a credible editorial format that can be shared with colleagues, customers, peers and their broader professional network.

OpenAI already has all the awareness it needs

Launches go into a fixed calendar

Other B2B marketers are spending more on events

Our take

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