OpenAI announced on Thursday (27) the launch of a commercial operation in Brazil, with an office in the city of São Paulo. The decision, released in a press statement, comes after the country became the third largest market for ChatGPT in the world, according to the company itself, as reported by G1 and Reuters.
According to the figures the company disclosed, the number of Brazilian users of the chatbot nearly doubled over the past year. OpenAI did not say how many people use the tool in the country, but stated that Brazilians send 215 million messages per day to ChatGPT. Brazil also has the highest rate of image usage on ChatGPT in the world and ranks among the five largest markets for voice and dictation features. "The number of weekly voice users in Brazil doubled over the past year," the company said in the statement.
Partnerships with ITA, Enter and Prodam
As part of the expansion, OpenAI announced a partnership with the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA), one of Brazil's most prestigious engineering schools, to offer accounts to students and credits for using its coding tools. The company is also developing, with Enter, a Brazilian legal-tech startup, a program for lawyers that will include training using ChatGPT.
The third front is a memorandum of understanding signed with Prodam, the data-processing company owned by the São Paulo city government, to make artificial intelligence tools available. The released documents do not detail the amounts or timelines of these agreements.
The arrival of a formal commercial operation means OpenAI will now sell to and serve clients directly in the country, instead of operating only from abroad. On the supply side, Brazilian companies and professionals, such as the lawyers in the Enter partnership and ITA students, gain a local channel for access, training and contracting of the tools. On the consumption side, the announcement only confirms what the numbers already showed: with 215 million messages a day, Brazilian users were already among the most active in the world on the service, and now they get a company structure inside the country.