Generative AI companies Anthropic and Databricks have teamed up to sell AI tools for business, trying to raise $100 million in five years, according to the Wall Street Journal. The partnership is an attempt to alleviate both companies being “under tremendous pressure” to perform relative to their valuations as the AI bubble threatens to burst.
What will the Anthropic/Databricks partnership look like for business customers?
Anthropic and Databricks sales teams will promote and sell one another’s products, according to The Wall Street Journal. The companies will target large corporate customers who want to build their own AI agents, which are: generative AI tools that can chain together different tasks to, seemingly autonomously, arrive at the result the user expressed in natural language. For example, an AI agent asked to “order a pizza delivered to the office” might require access to the user’s mobile meal delivery app and place the order.
“Databricks has built up that trust with 10,000 customers,” Kate Jensen, Anthropic’s head of sales and partnerships, told The Wall Street Journal. “Anthropic is still relatively new, but continuing to grow extremely quickly.”
According to Databricks and Anthropic, customers have requested better integration between the two companies’ tools.
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Companies that use Databricks’ cloud data storage platform will be able to access Anthropic’s advanced generative AI, Claude, within it.
The two companies already have a relationship in place, with mutual customers like Block (owner of payment platform Square), using both Databricks and Anthropic’s Claude behind the scenes on its own AI agent. Coding is among the tasks Square employees use Claude on Databricks for.
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Blockers to generative AI adoption
Generative AI companies have struggled to generate revenue despite the hot buzz around investing in or using the technology; Anthropic and Databricks are betting on agentic AI being no different. Agentic AI still has a reputation for being inaccurate or inefficient; the Databricks research team is aiming for 95% accuracy among their AI agents, The Wall Street Journal said.
Agentic AI is the current buzzword in AI for business, with OpenAI adding speech to AI agents and Microsoft developing agents for specific cybersecurity tasks. Generative AI still has a trustworthiness problem, and prompt writing is an art unto itself that can take time away from core business functions.