Ready or not, enterprises are betting on AI

Summary

This has been a big week for AI companies signing enterprise deals, with Zendesk unveiling new AI agents that are supposed to be able to resolve 80% of customer service issues, Anthropic and IBM announcing a strategic partnership, and Deloitte also announcing a deal with Anthropic. Plus, Google announced a new AI-for-business platform. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be smooth sailing for big organizations using AI. In fact, the timing of the Deloitte announcement was a bit awkward, coming on the same day the Australia Department of Employment and Workplace Relations said the professional services and consulting firm would have to pay a refund for delivering a report to the department with what appeared to be a number of AI-generated hallucinations. On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the latest AI headlines, contrasting it with last week’s news about the new Sora app. While AI companies may eventually make real money from consumer social networking apps, enterprise deals offer a more immediate path to significant revenue. You can read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. Anthony: I think this actually ties back to our discussion last week about some of these GenAI social networks. We were framing that as potentially a way that these AI companies could eventually make money, which I definitely think is the case, but there’s a long road to get there. And the enterprise, sometimes people don’t find it quite as interesting or sexy as consumer, [but] it’s actually where the real money is. Maybe Sora is how OpenAI will make money five years from now, but this is how these companies are going to make money now. And the Deloitte [news] was especially striking. Sometimes you can feel like a little bit of a broken record to just point out how these models [aren’t always] totally ready for prime time, but I find it encouraging that the Australian government actually pushed back and said, no...