OpenAI's AI data agent, built by two engineers, now serves 4,000 employees — and the company says anyone can replicate it

When an OpenAI finance analyst needed to compare revenue across geographies and customer cohorts last year, it took hours of work — hunting through 70,000 datasets, writing SQL queries, verifying table schemas. Today, the same analyst types a plain-English question into Slack and gets a finished chart in minutes.

The tool behind that transformation was built by two engineers in three months. Seventy percent of its code was written by AI. And it is now used by more than 4,000 of OpenAI's roughly 5,000 employees every day — making it one of the most aggressive deployments of an AI data agent inside any company, anywhere.

In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Emma Tang, the head of data infrastructure at OpenAI whose team built the agent, offered a rare look inside the system — how it works, how it fails, and what it signals about the future of enterprise data ...