OpenAI has hired its head of sales for its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) hub in Dublin, in what is seen as one of the company’s most significant appointments outside the US to date.
Industry veteran Sanj Bhayro started in January and is now building out his team in Dublin.
“Sanj joined the company in January and this senior appointment reflects our continued growth and long-term ambition across EMEA and investment at our European HQ in Dublin,” an OpenAI spokesman said in an emailed response to questions.
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The move is likely to be welcomed in Government circles, coming amid fears that Ireland was struggling to attract jobs and investment tied to AI. It is thought that Bhayro’s role could have gone to any of OpenAI’s offices within the EMEA region. Apart from Dublin, it also has offices in Paris, London and Munich.
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A source close to IDA Ireland described the hire as a significant one that reinforces Ireland as a location for AI-related investment. OpenAI currently has 60 employees in Dublin, across engineering, GTM, privacy, user operations, finance and HR. It is advertising for another 18 roles at present, including for two account directors in the sales team. The company in Ireland is led by Emma Redmond, its head of EU privacy and former Stripe chief privacy officer. It opened its Dublin office in 2023.
Led by chief executive Sam Altman, OpenAI is behind ChatGPT and its investors include Microsoft, which owns 27 per cent of the business.
“In just three years, OpenAI has transformed how people work and businesses operate, and in doing so has become the fastest-growing business platform of all time. Yet the reality is, we’re only just scratching the surface of what this technology can achieve,” Bhayro said in a LinkedIn post.
Bhayro is well known in Irish tech circles, having been general manager for EMEA at software-as-a-service firm Asana in Dublin as well as spells at Intercom and Google. Before joining Google in 2020 he spent more than 14 years at Salesforce, including as chief operating officer for EMEA.
Ireland has long been a centre for Big Tech firms but there have been concerns that it had yet to land significant numbers of jobs tied to artificial intelligence. That worry has become even starker given lay-offs at other tech firms.
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About 300 corporate jobs are understood to be at risk at Amazon’s Irish operation as the company cuts thousands of workers globally, while Intel – long a touchstone of the Irish tech industry – has seen global lay-offs amid plunging profitability. Meanwhile, about 300 jobs came under threat at TikTok last March, while Meta contractor Covalen is reportedly seeking about 400 redundancies in Dublin.
Even so, a number of AI firms have opened offices here. Apart from OpenAI, Anthropic opened a Dublin office in 2024 while legal services AI firm Harvey said last month that it expected to open an office here in March.
