Enterprise on edge

TL;DR: Within 36 hours of one another, Anthropic and OpenAI both made major enterprise pushes. Just days before that, a viral memo imagined how those kinds of moves would hollow out white-collar work (and even be the end of enterprise). Now, investors and executives are caught between embracing AI and wondering if they're accelerating their own obsolescence.

What happened: Yesterday, OpenAI unveiled partnerships with four major consulting firms, including McKinsey and Accenture, to roll out its nascent Frontier enterprise system. The goal: help large organizations deploy AI agents inside existing operations. Anthropic made a parallel move. The company announced it’s expanding plugins for Claude Cowork, adding custom skills—for everything from financial analysis to HR onboarding—to tools their employees already use. But perhaps the most telling detail: It revealed that Claude can now modernize COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still handles 95% of US ATM transactions and underpins IBM's consulting empire.

The enterprise race heats up: Companies spent about $37 billion on generative AI last year, which is roughly triple consumer spending, and that gap is widening. OpenAI is trying to claw back its enterprise revenue share, which has dropped since 2023. Meanwhile, Anthropic already generates most of its revenue from corporate customers and can’t afford to cede that advantage. Google is gaining fast too, selling 8 million paid Gemini Enterprise seats in about four months.

The frenemies’ dilemma: According to The Information, OpenAI leaders told investors last week that they expect future products to replace software from SaaS juggernauts like Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, Slack, and Atlassian—the exact tools Frontier is designed to integrate with. Anthropic hasn’t been as blunt, but its launches have contributed to the hit on software stocks.

So why do these companies keep inking what seems to be their own demise? Because the alternative—watching a competitor integrate AI first—might be scarier than partnering with the company building their replacement. For now.

Gasoline, meet fire: Over the weekend, financial research firm Citrini Research published a speculative scenario titled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," imagining widespread white-collar displacement and AI agents bypassing platforms altogether. The report took aim at Uber, DoorDash (whose co-founder responded on X), credit card companies like Amex and Visa, and SaaS platforms like ServiceNow. Their stocks all took a hit.

The Citrini memo went viral not because it was rigorous—it was a fictional thought experiment, not a forecast—but because it made legible a fear that this week’s enterprise announcements sharpened: that the AI being sold to businesses will also replace the businesses themselves.

Bottom line: The enterprise push will continue. The jumpiness probably will too. But, as Derek Thompson observed, not even the executives building these tools know how this plays out. —WK