Anthropic and OpenAI Battle for Enterprise AI

0:00The competition to capture enterprise by AI companies is heating up specifically from Anthropik and OpenAI, both of them are making very big plays right now to try and capture more enterprise users. We see a lot of, I guess, just regular day to day users going with OpenAI. But now also, that feels like it's shifting towards Google, who's picking up a lot of that market share. Anthropic, who has famously been, you know, the number one place that developers will go is also pushing into white collar work. So right now, there's basically a huge battle going on for this specific segment of White Collar and Enterprise.

0:33And I want to break down what OpenAI and Anthropik are currently doing the news today in regards to all that. Before we get into all that, I wanted to mention, I just released a complete overhaul of my platform, AIbox.ai. I've redesigned every screen, every page, and I hope it is way more useful, way more simple and clear to understand. If you've ever tried it in the past, I would love for you to try AIbox.ai again. And if you've never tried it, it's a platform where you get access to over 40 of the top AI models, everything from openai to anthropic to google to grok to 11 labs for audio tons of cool image generation models all in one place so you can test out all the latest models without having to have subscriptions to a dozen different platforms and all of your data is in one place also we have a vibe builder where you're able to describe a tool or workflow you want to create and we will have a vibe builder link together different ai models fill out the prompts and create a workflow for you if you want to try it out it is aibox.ai and i would love to hear what you think of the new redesign all right let's get into what's going on with enterprise so just on tuesday anthropic showed off a brand new enterprise agent program basically i think this is their most aggressive effort that they've made yet to try to get agentic ai practically inside every single company in the world they had like a whole briefing and their head of america's is kate jensen she said um quote 2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise but the hype turned out to be mostly premature.

1:57It wasn't a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach. So Anthropics new approach, I think right now, they're really focusing on deployment. They're not trying to just show off a bunch of demos of look, this is what could happen. Because I think what they're saying is the technology is probably there. The implementation is not, which I think is interesting. So under this new program, companies can use a plugin system to deploy prebuilt cloud powered agents, which they have a whole bunch of them, but they're tailored to a bunch of different, very common enterprise tasks and functions, things that need to be done.

2:28So finance teams can now spin up agents for market research and finance modeling. HR teams can generate job descriptions, onboarding materials, offer letters, legal departments get structured drafting and review workflows. So they built all these custom tools, which I know like every time they announce a new one, like the HR one or the finance one, everyone was like, Oh my gosh, you know, every every startup working in finance is cooked right now that's trying to like add AI into their tools, because now Anthropic just kind of does it natively. And to some degree, I like I get what they're saying.

2:59But on the other hand, I think this is phenomenal. I think that going to the application layer isn't a bad thing, especially when so many companies are struggling to actually integrate with AI and bring it inside of their organization. So right now, I think the idea is pretty simple. Instead of just asking companies to like, look, go, here's a here's a great clawed new model, it can do all this stuff, go experiment from scratch and figure it out. Anthropic basically is packaging all of the capabilities that they have from their model and specifically for agents into these like department ready modules.

3:29So like, look, if you're in HR, here's everything we recommend. If you're in finance, here's everything we recommend. And if you know, if you're in legal, etc. So I think this is a great direction and push from Anthropic. As far as getting more adoption going, they recently said, quote, we believe that the future of work means everybody having their own custom agent. That was Mac Piccoletta, who is Anthropics chief product officer. I think a lot of the infrastructure builds on some tools that they announced earlier. There's Cloud Cowork, which is Anthropics kind of plugin system that came into a research preview in January.

4:04And I think it's now basically how companies are going to be integrating different tools and different AI capabilities into their organizations. Honestly, I think this is great. cloud coworkers a lot like cloud code, which has been, you know, basically the most useful cloud tool, or I guess maybe the most popular cloud tool to date with developers. And now they're making cloud cowork, which is the same thing for everyday white collar workers. Now, what I will say is the use case I use cloud for the most actually have the cloud Google Chrome plugin, and I think their computer use is amazing. So essentially, on this Chrome plugin, it's like a sidebar that when you click it pulls up on the side of your any sort of Chrome browser, I use Brave, but it'll work on Google Chrome.

4:43And you just say, hey, I'm on a page right now. I need to go relabel and change, you know, the titles of these 100 files on my, like personally, I recently used it to go change the publishing date on a whole bunch of YouTube shorts on a particular channel for my podcast. I found if I changed the date on the publishing date for shorts that hadn't performed well, then YouTube's algorithm would give them another boost. Anyways, it was a strategy I was trying out. and instead of manually doing it or maybe making a video and sending it to a virtual assistant to go do it for me, I had Claude go through I think like 150 of these things very quickly, fix the problem, had some awesome results from it and consequently I didn't have to do that kind of tedious task myself.

5:27Now this same sort of concept is essentially what's going on with Claude Cowork and it pops up beside you and it can integrate with a lot of your different tools and workflows and just do things for you and I love that Claude actually lets these tools like take control of your computer and get stuff done. So this is basically where I think that they can win and beat other players. Now, I think their system currently includes private internal marketplaces, controlled data flows, centralized admin management, and also customizable plugins. So Cloud Agents can basically be deployed with the same, you know, have like all the permissions and the oversight controls that most corporate IT departments expect to be added to a lot of this enterprise software.

6:07Cloud is building all of that in, which I think is really smart. They also said, quote, admins want to be able to have really, really, really tailored workflows and skills for their specific organizations. And this allows the admin of a Cloud co-work organization to do that in a very centralized way. I think right now, Anthropic is basically expanding all of their enterprise connectors. So they're introducing integrations with Gmail, DocuSign, Clay, there's a whole bunch of other ones. And essentially, all these connectors that they have let the agents pull in live context and they can act across different systems so you know it's like we're so used to like you know go chat with clod and it's generating text and in like in its own little clod.ai or clod.com or whatever or chat gpt and chat gpt.com what they're trying to do and what you see microsoft doing and open ai trying to focus on is how do we get this instead of just being on like our own kind of um our own little isolated bubble how do we get this into the actual workflow into the actual tools and integrate with the actual tools they're using to guarantee that we're I mean basically we're being used instead of a competitor and so this is what it feels like everyone's trying to do they're trying to reduce the friction get one step closer to where the task is actually being accomplished I for one think this is a fantastic strategy obviously I think it's kind of hard to miss what the implications of that will be because basically if agents can reliably handle something like you know financial analysis or contract drafting or you know maybe hr documentation you know competitive research or so many different areas i think a meaningful piece of what software tools focused on in those verticals um what they're able to do is going to come under pressure and we saw when i think anthropic released a new update opus 4.6 we saw a whole bunch of and also i think claude co-work when that came out as well we saw a whole bunch of tech stocks kind of crater in price on the public markets and a lot of people you know said this was due to the fact that anthropic is now going after individual segments like this and those companies are going to really struggle if anthropic is just plugged in like you don't necessarily need some of these software companies that have you know a clod integration to do something if clod can just do it directly without having to use them so i mean i think some of that a lot of that is overhyped you know specialized software like salesforce that's specifically for uh you know salespeople and they've been building it for 20 years and it's super, super refined and specific for what they need.

8:25Like, I think that that's always going to sort of win compared to maybe something that got vibe coded or something that Anthropik got bolted on top of. But I think that it's not guaranteed and they need to be very aggressive. Someone like Salesforce, for example, needs to be very aggressive in how they're integrating and how they're able to support their customers and put AI into it so that there's no moment where Anthropik becomes more useful just because it's better integrated with AI. So in addition to all of that, work that Anthropik is doing. OpenAI is also making a big push for the enterprise.

8:57On Monday, they announced enterprise expansion strategy. They have something called Frontier Alliance. This is basically a multi-year partnership with a bunch of big consulting firms. That's Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini. Basically what they're doing, they're moving in kind of a different, but I think it's sort of the same concept, but it's a different approach to it. Basically, they're saying enterprises are slow to adopt AI, and they're saying maybe that is, you know, not necessarily a problem, but we need to change the management. So OpenAI's forward deployed engineer team, they're going to work alongside all of these different consulting companies.

9:32So they're basically like hiring all the biggest consultants to get AI into more organizations. And basically what they're trying to do is implement OpenAI's enterprise technologies inside of all of their organizations. I think the kind of the core of this, what they're trying to do right now is a no code platform that they launched in early February, which basically lets a company build, deploy and manage AI agents. So of course, it's all going to be built on top of OpenAI's models, but they're letting companies build their own agents. And, and now they're going to be getting all of these consultants to help companies roll them out and actually use them.

10:08I think OpenAI right now is betting that consultants are basically going to be their bridge between getting their technology into all of the enterprise organizations versus those companies going and using a competitor because if the consultants are recommending them that's they that's what they think will be what drives what the organizations actually choose so the BCE CEO which is Christopher Schweitzer said AI alone does not drive transformation It must be linked to strategy built into redesigned processes and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to deliver sustained outcomes.

10:45So I think basically what he's saying is that the software is ready, but the organizations often are not. And they haven't been able to pull AI in. They haven't been able to figure it out. They haven't made it a priority. There's all sorts of hiccups and reasons why, but basically they haven't done it. So I think up until this point, enterprise AI adoption has been a lot slower than all of these insane investments that we see. right? We see these massive kind of investment numbers. And I think a lot of companies right now are experimenting. I think even fewer of them have kind of identified really clear, repeatable ROI on some of these tools.

11:17And I think the gap between maybe a company doing like a pilot project and actually doing a, you know, scaling up their use case and their deployment is really big. So OpenAI right now, their alliance strategy, I think is going kind of beyond just like attaching AI onto a workflow that you use. And I think it's really kind of leaning on the consultants to help these companies rethink their workflows altogether to integrate AI where it makes like actual, you know, where it's actually changing like the cost structure or productivity curves. And then you have on the other side of that coin, Anthropic, who is trying to lower the friction from the inside out, right?

11:54They're trying to make it easier for IT departments to deploy controlled or maybe even department specific agents without having to rewrite the entire company playbook. And so I think right now you see like there's these two kind of approaches. Anthropic has made a whole bunch of its own consulting partnerships as well. Like I should mention that it's not just OpenAI who's going through these consultants. In the last couple months, Anthropic did some deals with Deloitte and Accenture. And so I'm so curious when like both of them are working with a company, for example, like Accenture, like who is Accenture going to go when their consultants go into an organization and recommend how to implement AI, like which company is going to be promoted or recommended when they have these deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic.

12:35OpenAI right now, they emphasize that enterprises are basically the core focus of this year, 2026. Their CFO, Sarah Fryer, she was highlighting how kind of this enterprise growth in January is really important and they were seeing some great growth. And then she said that they had already secured a whole bunch of really big deals this year with Snowflake, ServiceNow. And they also named Barat Zof to lead their enterprise sales effort. So they're putting a big push, a big focus. I mean, this is kind of what they said they're going to focus on this year. There are two different strategies now coming from OpenAI and Anthropic.

13:09Anthropic building more of these like customized tools to be deployed easier and all of the and everything that you need to be able to deploy those inside of the organization. And OpenAI, just hoping that the consultants can drive the change with what they have going on. So I think both companies are kind of moving beyond an era where they just release the greatest model, they try to get the headlines, they try to say, look, ours is the best, and let people find out. I think right now, how they're fighting this quote unquote battle or how they're trying to compete is that they're saying, look, agents are not just going to transform a company because they're impressive, it's going to only transform them if there's all the right tools.

13:49So governance, customer, like it's you know it's customizable it's economically defensible like it actually has positive roi and so i think that means the hype cycle hopefully is over um and now it's kind of this infrastructure and implementation phase where these organizations need to actually start taking what's out there and figuring out how to get positive roi how to implement it in ways that is useful for their organizations it's fascinating to see these two different approaches and anthropic and opening eye kind of coming at this from different angles but um it's going to be it's going to be interesting to watch thank you so much for tuning into the podcast if you enjoyed this episode make sure to leave a rating and review on the show honestly it just helps me out a ton i am so close guys i think i'm like two reviews away from 150 reviews on the show so if you wouldn't mind it would help the show immensely thank you so much and as always make sure to check out aibox.ai to get access to all of the best ai models in one place for uh 8.99 a month we just dropped some new pricing so you go check that out all right catch you in the next episode.