OpenAI's Enterprise Push Looks a Lot Like What Siemens Did in the '90s

You know what OpenAI's recent moves remind me of? When Siemens started giving away STEP 7 licenses to engineering schools in the mid-90s. Get them hooked early, make switching painful later. It's a strategy as old as industrial automation itself.

Look, here's the thing. OpenAI just announced they're giving ChatGPT Enterprise to the entire U.S. federal workforce for a year, essentially free. They're also making ChatGPT for Clinicians free for verified physicians, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists. And they've rolled out ChatGPT for Excel with their new GPT-5.2 model powering it.

This isn't charity. This is market capture.

The Lock-In Strategy

I called my old colleague at Rockwell last week, and we were talking about this exact pattern. When you give away software to institutions, especially regulated ones like government agencies and healthcare systems, you're not giving away anything. You're building switching costs.

Think about it. Once 2.3 million federal employees (that's the actual number in the executive branch) start building workflows around ChatGPT, once clinicians start documenting patient interactions with it, once financial analysts build Excel models that depend on GPT-5.2's capabilities, what happens when the free year ends?

They pay. Or they spend months migrating to something else, retraining staff, rebuilding workflows. I watched this happen with PLCs in manufacturing. Once a plant runs on Siemens, it stays on Siemens. The code, the training, the institutional knowledge, it all creates gravity.

The Apple partnership fits the same pattern. Integration into iOS and macOS means ChatGPT becomes the default AI for hundreds of millions of devices. Default wins. Always has.

What's interesting is the enterprise healthcare angle. Genmab, the biotech company, launched what they're calling "AI Everywhere" with ChatGPT Enterprise. OpenAI's blog makes a big deal about their "commitment to security and privacy," which, I'll be honest, remains to be tested at scale in regulated environments. We don't know yet how HIPAA compliance will hold up when clinicians are feeding patient data into these systems daily.

Here's what I'm watching:

• The federal contract value: OpenAI says "essentially no cost" but the GSA partnership has to have terms. What happens in year two? The pricing structure will tell us everything about their long-term strategy.
• Healthcare liability: When a clinician uses ChatGPT for documentation or research and something goes wrong, who's responsible? This is genuinely unclear.