AI models are becoming ever more capable, but exactly what enterprise adoption will look like remains a big question. In a bid to shape that future, labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have spun up separate businesses dedicated to deploying AI engineers to their customers’ offices — a bet that assisting businesses in figuring out how to use their AI models is the next trillion-dollar category.
One of those businesses now has a name: Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5-billion, AI implementation company that the AI lab launched in May as part of a joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others. The move follows OpenAI’s own take on this, The Deployment Company, underscoring a growing acknowledgement among frontier AI labs that winning enterprise customers requires far more than shipping better models.
Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone, which noticed a gap when it had roped in large consulting firms and small AI services boutiques to implement AI across its portfolio companies. One of those boutiques, AI engineering services startup Fractional AI, apparently stood out, and the joint venture acquired the startup shortly after it was announced. (Fractional ended an 11-month partnership with OpenAI when it was acquired.)
Fractional has become the foundation of what is now Ode — a kind of “scaled boutique” AI services firm. And its leaders have ambitious goals.
“It’s pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday if we execute well,” Chris Taylor, CEO of Ode and co-founder of Fractional, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “The key challenge of the business is how do you go t …