OpenAI B2B applications CTO Srinivas Narayanan announces exit after three years

Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of business-to-business (B2B) applications at American artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced on Saturday that he would be leaving the company at the end of next week, marking the end of a three-year stint during a period of high-profile product launches.

In simultaneous posts shared on microblogging site X and professional networking platform LinkedIn, he said the decision followed recent product launches, describing it as “the right time to step back”.



Earlier in the day, Bill Peebles, who led OpenAI’s defunct short-form video app Sora, and Kevin Weil, the vice president of OpenAI for Science, shared the news about their exits in separate posts on X.

The departures come just weeks after Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s product and business chief, announced she would take a medical leave because of a worsening neuroimmune condition. Kate Rouch, OpenAI’s marketing chief, also decided to step down to focus on her cancer recovery earlier this month, and Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, transitioned to a new role focused on “special projects”.

India is OpenAI's second-largest market in terms of users, fastest growing and among the top five in terms of enterprise usage, and the company is now building products in the country which can be scaled up globally, Narayanan had told ET in an interview in November last year.

Answering questions on return on investment (ROI) in AI and worry of a bubble building up, he had said, “We are in the very early stages of probably the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes, I think talks of ROI and bubble are just too early. What I would say is that just look at the last few years and how much AI has delivered value, how fast these products have grown. Everything is unprecedented. And so that shows you the promise.”

On competition with Anthropic, which is expanding its enterprise play, he had said that competition is going to be there and shows the scope for what is possible.

Talking about the threat to India's software services industry with platforms like Codex, Narayanan had said that engineers will have to think like founders and CEOs, and strategise and let platforms take care of the operational tasks. He also spoke about the AI talent wars in Silicon Valley and the company’s data centre investments in India.

Also Read: Meet Srinivas Narayanan: IIT Madras alumnus who helped scale ChatGPT