AI models are becoming more capable, but exactly what enterprise adoption will look like remains a big unknown. In a bid to shape that future, labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have created independent companies dedicated to deploying AI engineers in their clients’ offices, a bid to help companies figure out how to use their AI models is the next trillion-dollar category.

One of those companies 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 vision for the matter, The Deployment Company, underscoring a growing recognition among cutting-edge AI labs that winning enterprise customers requires much more than shipping better models.

Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone, which noticed a gap when it turned to 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 its announcement. (Fractional ended an 11-month partnership with OpenAI when it was acquired.)

Fractional has become the basis for what is now Ode, a sort of “boutique at scale” AI services company. And its leaders have ambitious goals.

“It’s pretty easy to imagine this being a trillion-dollar company one day if we execute it well,” Chris Taylor, CEO of Ode and co-founder of Fractional, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “The key business challenge is how to get through that hypergrowth phase without losing emphasis on quality?”

Ode currently employs 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic’s Applied AI team to identify where technology can impact different businesses and create systems tailored to each organization’s operations.

Anthropic’s internal team will continue to focus on strategic implementations aligned with the mission, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. The private equity firms backing Ode will funnel their own portfolio companies to the joint venture as potential clients, although Ode will not limit sales of its services to those companies.

For Ode, an ideal customer is one whose CEO accepts the promise, according to Taylor.

“A lot of the work we’re doing is one or two top priorities for the CEO of the company,” Taylor said. “It’s either the most important product feature that the company is going to develop over the course of the next two years, or it’s reworking the most important business process that they have.”

Ode will operate on a “Claude first” principle, meaning it will implement Anthropic technology, including features like Claude Tag in Slack, wherever possible. However, the company is not limited to Anthropic’s technology and will use rival artificial intelligence products if necessary.

Eddie Siegel, chief technology officer at Ode and co-founder of Fractional, says the company’s secret sauce is its implementation quality and ability to create custom solutions to business problems.

“I think model selection is important, but it’s not where the majority of calories are spent,” Siegel said. “It’s an ingredient of a system that needs to be designed. It’s like choosing the programming language when building a piece of software.” […] “I wouldn’t define a business transformation in terms of whether they choose Python or Java.”

Taylor added that the fundamental belief behind Ode is that “non-AI companies will be among the big winners of this entire AI moment if they embrace the technology in the right way.” But taking AI, “this magical, mind-blowing ingredient,” and reconfiguring core business processes or customer experiences with it requires a lot of help, he said.

“That requires top-notch applied AI talent, which is not something most companies have,” Taylor said.

Ode executives describe their team as elite generalist software engineers, more than half of whom are former founders: the kind of people who can “juggle a really challenging technical problem, but also own something from start to finish,” according to Siegel. Or as one Blackstone executive put it: a team of “adult” engineers, the “special forces,” rather than an army of forward-deployed engineers (FDE).

As several people involved in the company told TechCrunch, demand for this type of FDE equipment far exceeds supply. Ode’s goal is to continue climbing, also internationally, while maintaining its positioning as a boutique company; in other words, conducting constant evaluations to measure the business impact of AI implementations.

But in a world where top engineering talent is already scarce, maintaining and growing such a team presents a real challenge. If becoming an elite applied AI engineer requires experience as an entrepreneur, systems-focused thinking, AI skills, and business product judgment, could Ode train enough people to meet the demand?

Adding to those difficulties is the fact that Ode will compete not only with OpenAI’s The Deployment Company, but also with consulting giants such as Deloitte and Accenture, which have created their own FDE teams.

Siegel isn’t overly concerned about the dwindling number of adult generalist engineers.

“It has never been easier to become an entrepreneur,” he said. “You learn a lot by trying to take problems from start to finish, trying to fit the product to the market, moving the needle in a business. You learn a lot there that you don’t just learn by solving a narrow problem. That’s the skill set that fits very well with Ode.”

It remains an open question whether enough such engineers will appear. But if Ode and his backers are right, the next big AI race won’t just be about the best models, but about who can put those models to work successfully within the world’s largest companies.