OpenAI's most effective channel for selling ChatGPT to businesses is field marketing, not digital advertising. Leila Woodington, OpenAI's head of B2B marketing, EMEA, said so directly at Semrush Spotlight in London today.

"Field is the one I would definitely put out as our strongest channel right now," Woodington said during a panel.

The choice is strategic. OpenAI owns one of the world's most recognizable AI brands, but brand awareness alone does not close enterprise contracts. Woodington drew a sharp line between using ChatGPT and buying it at scale. Awareness does not tell a company how to deploy the product across thousands of employees, she said. It also does not persuade the several executives who must sign off on the purchase.

What sits behind the field-first strategy?

In-person events form one piece of a wider effort to explain the product to business buyers. OpenAI supplements them with two other channels.

• A "bench of really carefully curated creators and influencers who genuinely love our products," in Woodington's words, activated whenever the company ships something new.
• Paid social, which is scaling fast. OpenAI doubled its sponsored Instagram posts promoting ChatGPT from 61 in June to 122 in July, according to Business Insider.

Woodington framed the mix as necessary because the sale is complicated. "This is a complex buying decision that we're influencing," she said. "No single one of those things is going to persuade the CEO of Fortune 500 companies to buy our technology."

How does OpenAI keep one brand message across a growing product line?

The company's product lineup keeps expanding. At its developer conference in San Francisco last month, OpenAI launched Dots, a persistent AI agent (software that runs continuously rather than responding to single prompts), alongside a raft of other tools.

Rather than build a fresh campaign for each launch, Woodington's team runs a fixed marketing calendar and slots new products into it. The calendar includes about two webinars a month.

"We have a set of activities that are predefined, and then we plug launches into them, rather than taking every single launch and then spinning our wheels trying to figure out a way to get it to market," she said.

Does localization matter to the go-to-market plan?

OpenAI is also building local teams in the markets it sells to. Woodington said these teams include people who understand local languages, cultures, and trade organizations.

Her background shapes the approach. Woodington spent more than a decade building Facebook's B2B marketing function before working at Snap and an AI-powered video startup. She joined OpenAI more than a year ago to help build its marketing operation.

She also acknowledged a common misperception among clients. "[CMOs] seem to expect that I'm completely on top of every single AI technology, at least within our own tools," Woodington said. "[But] we are trying to keep up in the same way as others."

The lesson for B2B marketers is blunt: even the most famous AI brand on earth cannot convert consumer awareness into enterprise revenue through digital channels alone. OpenAI is putting people in rooms, on stages, and in local markets to close the gap.