Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Cloud Moving Downward into the Enterprise Implementation Business

IBL News | New York

AI frontier models are seeking to move beyond infrastructure, software licensing business, and API services in an AI-first world.

They are launching private equity firms backed by institutional capital and are willing to enter the enterprise workflows business by moving closer to implementation, orchestration, and transformation work — an area that has long been dominated by IT outsourcing firms.

These AI-native companies increasingly want to own more of the enterprise workflow layer, while enterprises themselves want greater control over strategic technology capabilities, specifically execution, governance, and accountability.

On May 4, Anthropic unveiled a $1.5 billion venture backed by investors, including Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and Sequoia Capital.

On the same day, it was disclosed that OpenAI was raising over $4 billion for its own initiative, “The Development Company,” at a reported valuation of $10 billion.

Weeks earlier, Google Cloud announced strategic partnerships with Vista Equity Partners and CVC. It is also reportedly exploring arrangements with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT.

Analysts say this approach increasingly resembles the “forward-deployed engineer” model popularised by Palantir, where software companies move beyond selling technology and embed themselves deeply within enterprise operations.

The model is based on deploying forward-deployed engineers — a kind of AI deployment engines — to work side by side with portfolio companies of private equity firms, helping them build and optimize AI solutions on top of its models and broader AI stack.

Karthik Narain, Chief Product and Business Officer at Google Cloud, said that these partnerships would accelerate AI adoption across sectors and drive industry-wide digital transformation. Anthropic is targeting mid-sized companies in sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, real estate, and infrastructure.

“Demand for hands-on AI implementation in sectors is significantly outpacing what is available across the industry today,” he said.

Krishna Rao, chief financial officer at Anthropic, said this month that the company’s partnerships remain central to how Claude reaches large enterprises, and that it continues to “invest deeply” in those relationships.

Currently, enterprises need engineers to migrate infrastructure, modernize applications, integrate systems, and manage increasingly complex digital estates. At the same time, implementation work, coding, testing, support, maintenance, and orchestration are increasingly becoming automatable.

Boosting AI adoption among enterprises is a strategic necessity for Anthropic and OpenAI as they seek to bolster revenue growth and justify their sky-high valuations ahead of their highly anticipated initial public offerings, which can come this year.

For Google, the move is equally crucial to maintain the rapid growth momentum at Google Cloud, which is emerging as a key growth engine for the tech giant’s revenues and profits.

During the company’s earnings call this month, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that enterprise AI solutions became the primary growth driver for Google Cloud for the first time in the past quarter.