OpenAI transforms strategic planning with Anaplan

When you're building the future of AI, workforce planning needs to be just as intelligent. For OpenAI — a company experiencing exponential growth and operating at the forefront of artificial intelligence — traditional tools such as spreadsheets and static dashboards could no longer support the pace and complexity of their business decisions.

To meet its operational and financial planning needs, OpenAI partnered with PwC and selected Anaplan as the foundation for an enterprise-wide planning transformation. Together, they have established a foundation for flexible, integrated, and AI-enabled planning ecosystem built for scale.

Why OpenAI chose Anaplan: A strategic shift

As OpenAI’s business has scaled into the hundreds of millions of weekly active users, their manual planning processes became unsustainable.

Before implementing Anaplan, workforce planning at OpenAI was entirely spreadsheet-based. Headcount was tracked in Google Sheets and Excel, positions were created ad hoc, and recruiting plans were managed through disconnected documents. Every hiring decision required multiple steps: updating spreadsheets, syncing with HR and recruiting teams, and chasing down the most recent version of the plan.

As the company scaled — tripling headcount year-over-year — this approach quickly broke down. Spreadsheets lacked version control, couldn’t keep up with organizational changes, and provided little visibility into where hiring stood across the business. Information moved slowly, decision-making lagged, and teams couldn’t get a real-time view of their organization

“Spreadsheets could no longer keep up with the velocity of our growth and the level of insight we required,” said Jeremy Stern, Head of Strategic Finance at OpenAI. “We needed a platform that could scale with us, provide real-time visibility, and support integrated planning across our teams.”

OpenAI turned to Anaplan to modernize its planning infrastructure, beginning with workforce planning — a practice area that commonly experiences significant friction in large enterprise due to rapid hiring and poor visibility into headcount data. In just six weeks, OpenAI built a real-time workforce planning model integrated with its HR and recruiting systems, enabling dynamic position management and governance, and organizational insights.

From there, the team continued expanding its efforts with PwC’s support, launching a comprehensive income statement model in only eight weeks.

Building with Anaplan Polaris: High-dimensional planning at scale

A critical enabler of this transformation was Anaplan Polaris, our next-generation calculation engine designed for large-scale, high-dimensional modeling.

“Polaris has completely transformed the way we interact with data,” said Stern. “We’ve built models with up to eight or nine dimensions and trillions of cells. One of our most-used dashboards now runs on a Polaris-powered cube that’s accessed multiple times per day across teams.”

PwC echoed the significance of Polaris: “It enables organizations to model their business as it truly exists, without compromising dimensionality or performance,” said Hank Woo, Managing Director at PwC. “With Polaris, there’s no need to restructure or simplify data to fit technical constraints.”

Operational efficiency in action

The impact of OpenAI’s Anaplan implementation has been substantial. Teams across the organization have experienced improvements in speed, forecast accuracy, and strategic insight.

One example: the finance team member responsible for payroll and equity forecasting reduced a multi-day manual process to just a few hours. “We’ve significantly minimized the time spent on data prep and validation, allowing teams to shift their time and attention to analysis and decision-making,” Stern noted.

Additionally, the integration of ChatGPT into the Anaplan ecosystem has yielded early successes. OpenAI has deployed generative AI to:

• Automate documentation and training via custom GPTs
  
• Enable real-time data retrieval and Q&A for executive stakeholders
  
• Assist in analysis and generating presentations directly from Anaplan outputs
  

A joint vision for the future

With workforce and income statement planning in place, OpenAI has developed a multi-year roadmap that includes:

• Revenue forecasting
  
• Gross margin modeling
  
• Compute and CapEx planning for strategic initiatives
  
• Equity management
  
• Long-range financial planning
  

OpenAI’s journey with Anaplan demonstrates what’s possible when the right platform, partners, and people come together with urgency and clarity.

“As our business grows, we need planning tools that are not only fast and scalable, but also intelligent and adaptable,” said Stern. “With Anaplan and PwC, we’ve built a foundation that supports both the complexity of today and the unknowns of tomorrow.”