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NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - The joint ventures OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) and Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) separately created with private equity firms are in talks to acquire services companies that help businesses deploy artificial intelligence, with OpenAI's new venture in advanced stages on three deals, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The AI companies are looking to incorporate hundreds of engineers and consultants to help companies put their AI models to work, five of the people said.
The acquisitions would mark a new front in the competition for AI market share between the companies. While both have largely focused on building more powerful AI models, deploying them at scale requires a different kind of expertise — one they are now looking to buy.
OpenAI is raising roughly $4 billion from 19 investors, including TPG, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management, for its joint venture, Reuters previously reported. The vehicle, called The Deployment Company, will be announced later this week, one of the people said. Anthropic is making a similar push by raising $1.5 billion from investors including Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Most of the capital raised through the joint ventures is expected to fund acquisitions of engineering services and consulting firms, the people said, asking not to be named as the information is private.
OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment.
NEED FOR SKILLED, LABOR-INTENSIVE SERVICES
The move reflects a tension at the heart of the enterprise AI industry: what is often cast as a high-margin software business that could eliminate the need for consultants still depends on labor-intensive, highly skilled services.
That is because companies need engineers and consultants to tailor AI models to their specific data, systems and workflows, and to adapt the software as business needs change.
Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer of Blackstone, said in a statement that hiring highly skilled workers will "break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption."
The approach mirrors Palantir’s model of embedding engineers inside customers’ operations to implement and adapt their software — a playbook the AI industry is now replicating at scale.
It also suggests OpenAI and Anthropic could consolidate a fragmented market of smaller consulting and IT services firms as they build dedicated deployment arms.
"We believe it can help break down one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption by expanding the number of highly skilled implementation partners,” Gray said of Anthropic's joint venture.
(Reporting by Milana Vinn in New York; Writing by Sabrina Valle; Editing by Echo Wang, Rod Nickel)