Ready or not, enterprises are betting on AI

This was a big week for AI companies signing business deals, with Zendesk unveiling new AI agents that should be able to solve 80% of customer service issues, Anthropic and IBM announcing a strategic partnership, and Deloitte also announcing a deal with Anthropic. Additionally, Google announced a new AI-for-business platform.

That doesn’t mean things will be smooth sailing for large organizations using AI. In fact, the timing of Deloitte’s announcement was a bit strange, considering it came on the same day that Australia’s Department of Employment and Industrial Relations said the professional services and consultancy firm would have to pay a refund for providing a report to the department detailing 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 with last week’s news about the new Sora app. While AI companies can ultimately make real money from consumer social networking apps, enterprise deals offer a more direct path to significant revenue.

Below you can read a sample of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

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

Maybe Sora is how OpenAI will make money in five years, but this is how these companies will make money now.

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

It’s not necessarily that no one should ever use AI when creating these types of reports, although I think you could make that argument. But if you’re going to do it, you have to actually be responsible for the results. You really have to go through it and make sure the information being quoted is real. You can’t enter it into a model and just [say] “Okay, my job is done, that’s how many billable hours.” I think anyone who does that should be ashamed and fined.

Kirsten: Absolute. Sean, Zendesk also had an announcement this week and they’re in the process of creating these tools that will handle pretty much all of customer service, essentially removing the human from that process. In your daily life [life]How do you interact with the world or how car manufacturers, for example, handle service, are you starting to see things like that? [automation] crawl in?

Sean: Yes, I’ve written about it a few times. There are a ton of different startups developing full customer service suites, voice agents, and email and text messaging LLMs [from] dealers and service centers. I actually think that’s a good idea because the problem isn’t there: we don’t have enough people for the jobs to do this kind of thing and it will take away their jobs. It’s that you can never get someone on the phone, otherwise you get tossed back and forth.

Especially if you go for service, you will be redirected to the service department. Everyone is busy. So if you can capture it accurately and make it easier for people to get an answer, the question for me is to what extent these companies will adopt it and stick with it. There’s been all kinds of technologies over the years, like web forms and things like that, where these dealers have done it and then they forget about it. And then it’s just on their website and you think 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 this kind of thing will actually be the first point of contact for people [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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