According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic and Databricks have joined forces to sell AI tools for businesses, with the goal of raising $100 million over the next five years. The collaboration is an attempt to alleviate both companies’ “tremendous pressure” to perform relative to their valuations as the AI bubble threatens to burst.
What will the Anthropic/Databricks partnership mean for business customers?
The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic and Databricks’ sales teams will collaborate to promote and sell each other’s products. The companies will target large corporate customers who want to create their own AI agents, which are generative AI tools that can chain together various tasks to seemingly autonomously arrive at the result expressed by the user in natural language. For example, if an AI agent is asked to “order a pizza delivered to the office,” it may need to access the user’s mobile meal delivery app to complete the order.
“Databricks has established that trust with 10,000 customers,” Anthropic’s head of sales and partnerships, Kate Jensen, told The Wall Street Journal. “Anthropic is still in its early stages, but it is rapidly expanding.”
Customers have asked Databricks and Anthropic for better integration of their tools.
Companies that use Databricks’ cloud data storage platform will be able to integrate Anthropic’s advanced generative AI, Claude.
The two companies already have a relationship in place, with mutual customers such as Block (owner of payment platform Square), which employs both Databricks and Anthropic’s Claude behind the scenes on its own AI agent. Coding is one of the tasks Square employees use Claude on Databricks for.
Obstacles to generative AI adoption.
Despite the excitement surrounding investing in or using the technology, generative AI companies have struggled to generate revenue; Anthropic and Databricks are betting that agentic AI will be no exception. Agentic AI has a reputation for being inaccurate or inefficient, but the Databricks research team aims for 95% accuracy among their AI agents, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Agentic AI is the current buzzword in AI for business, with OpenAI adding speech to their agents and Microsoft developing agents for cybersecurity tasks. Generative AI still lacks trustworthiness, and prompt writing is a skill in and of itself, diverting attention away from core business functions.
