Anthropic and Databricks Partner to Target Enterprise AI Market

Anthropic and Databricks have announced a five-year, $100 million partnership to sell AI tools to businesses, the Wall Street Journal reports. This collaboration aims to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for AI agents, a technology that is rapidly gaining traction in the corporate world, but whose true value proposition remains somewhat uncertain.

The deal is structured as a commercial and engineering partnership, with both companies' sales teams cross-selling each other's products. Anthropic's flagship Claude models will be directly integrated into Databricks' platform, enabling businesses to build AI agents using their own data.

This partnership is designed to leverage the existing customer base and established reputation of both companies.

"Databricks has built up that trust with 10,000 customers," said Kate Jensen, Anthropic's head of sales and partnerships. "Anthropic is still relatively new, but continuing to grow extremely quickly."

The focus of the partnership is on AI agents, a technology that allows AI to perform tasks on behalf of humans. However, the value proposition of AI agents for enterprise software vendors and their clients remains an open question.

"There is a lot of 'hype' around the technology," said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO, "but the biggest problem with agents so far is their lack of reliability, or accuracy."

Ghodsi emphasizes that AI agents need to achieve over 95% accuracy to be on par with human workers. Databricks' research team is focused on helping customers achieve this level of accuracy.

Other major software vendors, including OpenAI, Salesforce, Amazon, and Google, are also offering tools for building or using AI agents. Databricks and Anthropic highlight that joint customers have expressed a need for smoother integration between their technologies.

Block, the parent company of Square, is cited as an example of a company using Databricks combined with Anthropic's Claude model to power its general-purpose AI agent. Thousands of Block employees are currently utilizing Claude through Databricks for tasks such as coding.

Databricks, a San Francisco-based company, generates revenue by renting out analytics, AI, and other cloud-based software that uses AI-ready data for building enterprise technology tools. The company recently completed a $10 billion funding round, bringing its valuation to $62 billion.

Databricks, founded in 2013, acquired the AI startup MosaicML in 2023 for approximately $1.3 billion and is expanding MosaicML's services, partly through its deal with Anthropic, to capture a larger share of the corporate AI market. Ghodsi hinted that the company is considering an initial public offering (IPO) as early as next year.

Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI startup, recently completed a $3.5 billion funding round, valuing the company at $61.5 billion. The company has emphasized its focus on the safety of its AI models and has been actively building its brand among large businesses seeking to utilize AI. Approximately half of Anthropic's sales team is dedicated to selling to enterprises.