OpenAI Completes Second Acquisition of Company Whose Product Is Humans at Client Offices

SAN FRANCISCO—OpenAI's deployment arm said Tuesday it has agreed to acquire Northslope, a startup founded by former Palantir engineers, adding what the company described as "hundreds of forward-deployed engineers" to its operations — a term of art for humans assigned to be physically present at enterprise client locations so that AI-powered software performs as described in the sales process.

The acquisition is the second in two months for OpenAI Deployment Company, which received $4 billion in capital at its May launch to purchase companies and capabilities. Both acquisitions have been of firms whose primary deliverable is skilled people who travel to offices.

Northslope's founders brought expertise in forward deployment from Palantir, where the model — embedding technical staff inside banks, federal agencies, and hedge funds to maintain the relationship between software and the organizations contractually committed to using it — was developed as a commercial strategy in the early 2010s.

The arrangement allows OpenAI to offer enterprise clients access to advanced artificial intelligence, along with a person in the building who understands what it does.

OpenAI declined to specify the ratio of AI to human labor in a typical enterprise engagement. A spokesperson said the company's products "dramatically reduce the need for human intervention in most workflows."

The company has now spent a portion of its $4 billion acquisition fund on two companies that provide human intervention.

"The models do the reasoning," the spokesperson said. "The forward-deployed engineers handle the rest."