OpenAI Acquires the Convogo Team
OpenAI has announced that it will acquire the team behind Convogo, an executive coaching AI startup, in a move focused on talent acquisition rather than buying software or intellectual property. The deal brings Convogo’s three co-founders, Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett, into OpenAI’s workforce through an all-stock agreement. Convogo’s product will be discontinued as its team transitions to new work within OpenAI.
This transaction is not a full acquisition in the traditional sense. OpenAI will not take ownership of Convogo’s existing technology or platform. Instead, the company has opted to hire the founders to strengthen its “AI cloud efforts,” according to a spokesperson. This approach allows OpenAI to bring in specialized experience without integrating a separate product line.
What Convogo Did
Convogo began as a project to automate leadership assessment and reporting for executive coaches, consultants, talent leaders, and human resources teams. The idea reportedly came from a practical problem faced by one co-founder’s mother, an executive coach who needed help reducing manual report writing. Over the past two years, Convogo’s platform supported thousands of coaches and partnered with major leadership development firms before this deal.
The software of the firm has been assisting its customers to expedite feedback and assessment processes with the use of artificial intelligence, thus the labor-heavy tasks have become quicker and more adaptable. Nonetheless, OpenAI was mainly attracted to acquiring the skills of the experts who had developed the product rather than moving that product forward.
Why OpenAI Made the Move
OpenAI’s acquisition of the Convogo team is indicative of the company’s intent to secure talent that is specialized in the field and capable of expanding the company’s dimensions of expertise.
This acquisition is OpenAI’s ninth in just about a year, and the previous similar moves often involved shutting down the acquired products while the teams were absorbed into OpenAI. Among the recent team acquisitions, that of Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds are notable ones. A few, however, have resulted in integration of parts into OpenAI’s product mix, Statsig and Sky are such examples.
This choice of strategy focusing on personnel instead of products, probably, emphasizes the company’s trust in human expertise. OpenAI is valuing highly the teams able to train advanced AI models on real-world applications and that can be part of very the future tools and services, especially in its AI cloud infrastructure and enterprise solutions.
What This Means for Convogo Customers
The decision to discontinue the product has been made, and now the coaching professionals and companies that relied on Convogo will have to look for new methods to keep the leadership assessment and reporting process automated.
The product is going to be discontinued and the support will be stopped, but the founders’ association with OpenAI may lead to the development of tools that combine advanced AI technology with business needs that are easy to use in practice.
The founders in their communication to the users acknowledged that their stay at Convogo made them aware of the disparity between the potential of the AI models and the accessibility of this potential through practical, everyday outcomes. They were confident that the joining of OpenAI would allow them to tackle these problems on a larger scale.
Context Within the Industry
OpenAI’s plan is part of a larger trend in the artificial intelligence industry, where major companies are progressively using acqui-hires to acquire specific talents. The people who have the skills to do AI technology and the use of AI in the different professional areas are the ones that are most needed.
This move indicates the extent to which talent is considered to be a critical resource as AI tools are distributed among business, enterprise, and cloud-based products.
The company is shifting its attention to talent at the time when AI adoption is rapidly growing and changing. OpenAI intends not only to make its capabilities bomb-proof for the long haul by adding experienced teams but also to prepare itself for new solutions that clearly go beyond general AI tools and are more practical and specific to the industry.
