EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI ANZ partnerships director on how they’re using partners to scale

Kevin Park discusses how partners can make money through implementing the technology.

As OpenAI is gearing up to launch its inaugural partner program in a few weeks, its ANZ partnerships director emphasised the importance of partners in scaling the business.

Kevin Park, partnerships director ANZ at OpenAI told CRN, “We cannot scale without the help of partners.

“We are very clear in our direction to scale through partners, both in terms of just meeting where the customers are at, but also the services and capabilities that we can deliver.”

The tech giant has been working with Australian partners for close to a year.

The upcoming partner program, which Park could only discuss a part of, is set to feature the usual bells and whistles of a partner program including three tiers, certifications, badging and revenue metrics, plus case studies.

He said it will be a very “familiar model”.

“We are in a race to drive as much positive AI stories into the market as possible,” he explained.

“The benefits will be typical co-sell, marketing funding, when possible, access to early access betas and so that our partners can stay at the very front of what's coming next, and prepare our customers for adoption.”

Park at OpenAI is responsible for looking after the ecosystem of mainly the service focus partners from GSIs, regional SIs and boutique partners.

“Anyone and everyone is helping customers understand what the AI opportunity is, how to implement it, and bridge the gap between what is possible and what is actionable,” he said.

Partners have been open and “overwhelmingly positive” to the opportunity around AI and OpenAI technologies, according to Park.

“I would say [it has been] overwhelmingly validating to hear that they see the opportunity around AI and specifically OpenAI technologies,” he said.

“They value our approach as the vendor in terms of being open and accessible. That's a word that's used a lot in terms of being practically helpful as an AI vendor.

“They're pleasantly surprised by how quickly we've grown our business in Australia and New Zealand, to have people like me and continue to invest.”

Read more of CRN’s interview with Kevin Park below.

CRN: Your partner program is about to launch mid-July, what have you been doing to prepare?

Kevin Park: This is not the absolute beginning of the partnering journey. We have been partnering with the likes of Mantel Group, Quantium, Pathfindr, and Insurgence AI. These are some of the earlier partnerships that we've been working with in Australia already without the actual formal partner program.

It’s not to say the July date is when it all starts, we've been gradually building to that point with a simpler construct up until this point of a service partner agreement. We've learned a lot of lessons in the last year or so of doing that, where we know what we believe to be the right construct in terms of the requirements and the benefits that you would typically find in a vendor program.

We built all that over all those learnings into that. What is the good number of badged capability measure to apply to a partner? We needed that runway to understand that. This brings it into the partner ecosystem a much more focused maturity.

It's the next stage of the partnership, and it will make it easier for partners to interact with us in terms of knowing what they need to do and where they need to focus in order to have a much more meaningful partnership with OpenAI going forward.

CRN: How many partners are you looking for in Australia?

Park: We don't have a set number. The operating philosophy is quality over quantity. Some of the work that, for example, the Pathfindr Group, they started off only a couple of years ago, but they've been able to drive such great customer experiences and impact at places like Coles, Virgin Australia.

These small boutiques are making outsized impact at some of the most frontier leading companies in Australia when it comes to adoption of AI. Quality is what we're looking for, regardless of the size of the partner or even the number of partners we're looking to have.

There is great demand, there's great interest from all partners, that's clear. I've never been so inundated with interest in partnering, which we're extremely grateful for. But right now, quality is paramount. We want our customers to have the best experience of transitioning to AI.

CRN: Are you looking to work with MSPs?

Park: I would say we are certainly considering that. We do have some pockets around the world, where we have started to pilot the resale model. Obviously, it's a significant change in investment, in terms of the systems and the infrastructure to be able to move your direct models to allow resell.

It's probably a matter of time. I would say it's something that we're investing in or looking into without any hard dates on that.

CRN: How can partners make money through OpenAI?

Park: I would put it into a few buckets, and the first one is that SaaS play. We have ChatGPT Enterprise.

I have my ChatGPT and Codex, which is more the agentic app that we've been selling very well in Australia, connected to my emails, my Slack, my Salesforce, Notion, Google Drive. Wherever our knowledge exists as a company, I've got my ChatGPT connected to, that is a massive driver of efficiency and productivity. That is our SaaS play.

We sell that ChatGPT Enterprise with all the security, governance and admin that you would expect from an enterprise version, and our partners, like Pathfindr, for example, have helped Virgin Australia deploy that, they've helped Coles deploy that, which is a change management, lots of enablement, champions program.

Getting the C level to understand some use cases of ChatGPT, rolling that out and making sure individuals in those organisations are getting the most value out of that.

We also sell our APIs, so OpenAI APIs are access to our models that companies can build on top of. Canva is a great example where they use our APIs as the underlying intelligence and wrap around. They are leveraging our intelligence under the hood. A lot of digital natives are using that.

Where do partners come into play in that? Partners can help integration and implementation of those APIs, and lots of services around that. I would say partners in the ecosystem are already making a lot of money on services. There's a huge shift in all the existing players that have been there for a long time to build practices around this, and that's where a lot of the interest in OpenAI comes from.

CRN: What do you love about the Australian market?

Park: There is a tremendous amount of innovation coming out of Australia and New Zealand as well, and we are both small in terms of numbers, but I believe, we punch above our weight in adopting these new tools.

Commonwealth Bank is a great example, they made a significant step last year in 2025 in becoming AI forward and AI native. They recently also opened an innovation hub in San Francisco, to be close to where the innovation is happening, that proximity is a main driver.

One of the largest, if not the largest organisation in Australia, has that appetite to invest that quickly. They're doing some amazing things in rolling out ChatGPT to 50,000 employees, but also lots of specific use cases to improve their services to everyday Australians. That appetite for adoption, testing and experimenting is something that I enjoy about the Australian market.

CRN: What is your message to your partners?

Park: We look forward to bringing the best of OpenAI technology to the partners, and in return, looking forward to seeing the partner network really specialise in what they're good at, which is understanding the customer's needs, the IP that the customer has bringing that context into an AI operating model for those organisations.

The other thing, as well as an ask to the ecosystem is moving towards outcome-based pricing, that's something that I believe will become even more important for Australian enterprises, understanding how to budget for AI and predictability as much as possible.

The best partners that I've seen in the market right now are the ones that are so confident in what they're going to deliver that they provide outcome-based pricing models, as opposed to time and material.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.