By Milana Vinn<\/p>\n
NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) – The joint ventures OpenAI<\/a> (OPAI.PVT<\/a>) and Anthropic (ANTH.PVT<\/a>) separately created with private equity firms are in talks to acquire services companies that help businesses \u200cdeploy artificial intelligence<\/a>, with OpenAI’s new venture in advanced stages on three deals, people familiar with \u200cthe matter told Reuters.<\/p>\n The AI companies are looking to incorporate hundreds of engineers and consultants to help companies put their AI \u200bmodels to work, five of the people said.<\/p>\n The acquisitions would mark a new front in the competition for AI market share between the companies. While both have largely focused on building more powerful AI models, deploying them at scale requires a different kind of expertise \u2014 one they are now looking to buy.<\/p>\n OpenAI is raising \u200croughly $4 billion from 19 investors, including TPG, \u2060Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management, for its joint venture, Reuters previously reported. The vehicle, called The Deployment Company, will be announced later this week, one of \u2060the people said. Anthropic is making a similar push by raising $1.5 billion from investors including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Journal reported.<\/p>\n Most of the capital raised through the joint ventures is expected to \u200bfund acquisitions \u200bof engineering services and consulting firms, the people said, \u200basking not to be named as the \u200cinformation is private.<\/p>\n OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment.<\/p>\n NEED FOR SKILLED, LABOR-INTENSIVE SERVICES<\/p>\n The move reflects a tension at the heart of the enterprise AI industry: what is often cast as a high-margin software business that could eliminate the need for consultants still depends on labor-intensive, highly skilled services.<\/p>\n That is because companies need engineers and consultants to tailor AI models to their specific data, systems and workflows, and to adapt the software \u200cas business needs change.<\/p>\n Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer \u200bof Blackstone, said in a statement that hiring highly skilled \u200bworkers will “break down one of the most \u200bsignificant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption.”<\/p>\n The approach mirrors Palantir\u2019s model of embedding engineers inside \u200ccustomers\u2019 operations to implement and adapt their software \u2014 \u200ba playbook the AI \u200bindustry is now replicating at scale.<\/p>\n It also suggests OpenAI and Anthropic could consolidate a fragmented market of smaller consulting and IT services firms as they build dedicated deployment arms.<\/p>\n “We believe it can \u200bhelp break down one of the \u200cmost significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption by expanding the number of highly skilled implementation \u200bpartners,\u201d Gray said of Anthropic’s joint venture.<\/p>\n (Reporting by Milana Vinn in New York; Writing \u200bby Sabrina Valle; Editing by Echo Wang, Rod Nickel)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Milana Vinn NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) – The joint ventures OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) and Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) separately…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[19031,53,6363,5805,13061,157,19030,17944],"class_list":{"0":"post-29014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-anthropic","8":"tag-ai-market-share","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-brookfield-asset-management","11":"tag-consultants","12":"tag-joint-ventures","13":"tag-openai","14":"tag-private-equity-firms","15":"tag-software-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}