Ready or not, enterprises are betting on AI

This has been a big week for AI companies signing enterprise deals, with Zendesk unveiling new AI agents that are supposed to be able to resolve 80% of customer service issues, Anthropic and IBM announcing a strategic partnership, and Deloitte also announcing a deal with Anthropic. Plus, Google announced a new AI-for-business platform.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to be smooth sailing for big organizations using AI. In fact, the timing of the Deloitte announcement was a bit awkward, coming on the same day the Australia Department of Employment and Workplace Relations said the professional services and consulting firm would have to pay a refund for delivering a report to the department with what appeared to be a number of AI-generated hallucinations.

On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the latest AI headlines, contrasting it with last week’s news about the new Sora app. While AI companies may eventually make real money from consumer social networking apps, enterprise deals offer a more immediate path to significant revenue.

You can read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Anthony: I think this actually ties back to our discussion last week about some of these GenAI social networks. We were framing that as potentially a way that these AI companies could eventually make money, which I definitely think is the case, but there’s a long road to get there. And the enterprise, sometimes people don’t find it quite as interesting or sexy as consumer, [but] it’s actually where the real money is. 

Maybe Sora is how OpenAI will make money five years from now, but this is how these companies are going to make money now.

And the Deloitte [news] was especially striking. Sometimes you can feel like a little bit of a broken record to just point out how these models [aren’t always] totally ready for prime time, but I find it encouraging that the Australian government actually pushed back and said, no, you cannot do this.

It’s not necessarily that no one should ever use AI in the creation of these kinds of reports, although I think you could make that argument. But if you’re going to do it, you actually have to be responsible for the outputs. You have to actually go through and make sure that the information being cited is real. You can’t feed it into a model and just [say] “All right, my job is done, that’ll be however many billable hours.” I think anyone who does that should be embarrassed and fined.

Kirsten: Absolutely. Sean, Zendesk also had an announcement this week, and they’re really creating these tools that are going to handle pretty much all of customer service, basically removing the human from that process. In your everyday [life], how you go about the world or how automakers deal with service, for instance, are you starting to see that kind of [automation] creep in?

Sean: Yeah, I’ve actually written about it a few times. There are a bunch of different startups that are developing full customer service suites, voice agents, LLMs for emails and texts [from] dealerships and service centers. I actually think that’s a worthy idea, because the problem there isn’t: We don’t have enough people for the jobs to do this stuff and it’s going to take their jobs away. It’s that you can never get somebody on the phone or you get bounced around. 

Especially going for service, you get bounced to the service department. Everybody’s busy. So if you can capture it accurately and make it easier for people to get a response, the question there for me is how much will those businesses adopt it and stick with it. There’s been all sorts of technologies over the years, like web forms and things like that, where these dealerships have done it, but then they forget about it. And then it just sits on their website and you think that it’s going to work, and then it doesn’t work, because they just want you to call them. 

So I have some optimism and some hope that stuff like this is actually gonna be people’s first touch point with [a business]. And it looks like we’re about to find out.

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.

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