Anthropic said the arrangement makes Accenture one of its three largest enterprise customers, and the consultancy plans to train about 30,000 staff on Claude, Anthropic’s top-shelf model.
The agreement arrives as Anthropic scraps with OpenAI and other rivals for corporate budgets. Consumers may have embraced chatbots, but many chief information officers remain sceptical that such spend will generate a decent return, which forces AI labs to justify their hefty invoices. At the same time, enterprises stumble through early-stage adoption.
Menlo Ventures, which backs Anthropic, reckons the outfit holds a 40 per cent market share for broad corporate AI use compared with OpenAI’s 27 per cent.
Microsoft added to the buzz in September by announcing that Claude would appear inside its Copilot suite despite its cosy link with OpenAI. Vals AI, which grades model performance, also rated the latest Claude as the strongest business performer across finance, legal work, and coding.
Accenture chief strategy and services officer Manish Sharma said the partnership lets both companies “be the bridge from AI to actually creating value. It is not about ‘We want to develop agents.’ We are in the business of delivering outcomes.”
Professional services giants once thought the AI boom would hand them an essential role guiding companies through deployment, yet several enterprises gripe that consultants have not delivered what was promised.
Anthropic and Accenture will first chase heavily regulated sectors, including financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and the public sector. They will also set up the Accenture Anthropic Business Group inside Accenture to help CIOs measure value and spread AI across engineering teams.
The group will include the 30,000 Claude-trained Accenture staff, along with thousands of reinvention-deployed engineers who are placed inside client firms to show them how to use AI.
Sharma said: “AI is a great technology, but we need to kind of clear the traffic, and I call that enterprise traffic for AI to be deployed and create value”.
Anthropic has an applied AI crew, and chief commercial officer Paul Smith said the company may pair one or two of its specialists with dozens of Accenture’s embedded engineers for each enterprise customer.
Smith said: “We will have some core expertise and some people in market and in region, but Accenture is really going to provide the scale and the heft”.
Both firms have previously inked deals with rival consultancies, as Anthropic works with Deloitte and Cognizant, while Accenture teams up with OpenAI and Cohere.