The organizational chart, it seems, sometimes precedes the organization.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that has spent the past two years becoming a household name through its ChatGPT service, is assembling the infrastructure of a mature advertising business — complete with the kinds of titles and reporting structures that typically take a decade to accrete — despite having only recently begun selling ads at all.

The hiring spree tracks with the company's stated ambitions, which are not modest. OpenAI has set a target of $100 billion in advertising revenue within five years of running its first campaign, a figure that would place it among the largest advertising sellers in the world, in a time frame that makes the growth trajectories of Google and Facebook look positively leisurely.

(One hundred billion dollars in five years. From a standing start. In this economy.)

"OpenAI's main interest is in building its ad revenue as big as possible, as quickly as possible," said Nate Elliott, a principal analyst covering artificial intelligence in marketing and commerce at eMarketer. The company is also pursuing a public offering at what Mr. Elliott described as "an enormous valuation," which tends to concentrate the mind on revenue lines that can be explained to institutional investors.

Mr. Elliott suggested that the current strategy — which appears to involve building internal sales capabilities while also exploring third-party partnerships — may be a transitional arrangement. "OpenAI could lean on third-party sellers to drive faster growth in the short term and then reevaluate that decision a couple years down the line," he said.

This is, of course, the standard playbook for technology companies that discover advertising later in life: build the machine first, then decide who gets to operate it.

Whether the org chart will eventually be filled with revenue, or merely with people waiting for revenue to arrive, remains to be seen. The chart, at least, is ready.

Original story published in Digiday: "OpenAI is already building the org chart of a mature ad business", by Krystal Scanlon