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Anthropic customers are already feeling pinched by the company’s AI price hikes, Aaron and I reported Wednesday. Making matters harder, Anthropic customers like PagerDuty and ServiceNow, which says it already blew through its full-year budget for Anthropic AI tools, can’t predict what they’ll pay this year. One reason Anthropic costs are tough to predict, ServiceNow chief digital information officer Kellie Romack told me, is that Anthropic doesn’t automatically show customers the kind of granular data that allows them to see which of its users consume which tools; how much they use the tools, and how they’re using them. Software firms such as ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft and Workday offer such “telemetry” data to their customers, she said. Having that data from Anthropic would make it easier to cut off employees who are “tokenmaxxing” or using the tools inefficiently. There are workarounds. Customers can monitor staffers’ usage of Anthropic’s tools to some extent by connecting their Claude accounts to an external analysis tool through standard application programming interfaces. But this requires customers to have access to such a tool to make sense of all that data. ServiceNow uses this method to track employees’ daily use of Claude tools through AI Control Tower, an application ServiceNow also sells to its own customers to monitor AI usage across their workforces, she said. Romack has assigned a member of her team to monitor the data through that app. Another Anthropic customer, insurer National Life Group, also faces a dearth of granular usage data about its employees’ Claude accounts. Nimesh Mehta, its chief information and strategy officer, said the issue makes Anthropic “great for consumer usage but not great for companies” that want to monitor individuals’ usage. Anthropic also doesn’t offer so-called service-level agreements with customers that define how well the product will perform and customer-service response times that the customers should expect, Romack and Mehta said. Such agreements are standard in the software industry. Romack said that while she wasn’t frustrated with Anthropic and understands that its technology and business are nascent, “I want more transparency.” (An Anthropic spokesperson did not have a comment.) More and more companies feel pressured to use Anthropic’s costly state-of-the-art tools and are clearly going to keep using them because their leaders think they can eventually make the numbers work. Such spending is also driven by the fear that rivals will figure out the economics before they do. On the bright side, customers can theoretically turn off such spending at the drop of a hat if they absolutely need to, or if cost-efficient alternatives materialize. That’s a far less painful lever to pull than laying off staff. Google Follows Palantir’s Playbook AI was supposed to make consultants obsolete. That’s not happening anytime soon. Google is the latest AI application maker to follow Palantir’s playbook by hiring specialist consultants who help large customers use the AI products. Google Cloud plans to hire hundreds of such specialists, known as forward deployed engineers, to help customers use Gemini AI tools, my colleague Erin reported. Google may end up moving existing employees to the new team. The news comes after OpenAI and Anthropic said they were setting up new entities with private equity firms to help companies “deploy” AI, and after software firms that also sell AI, including ServiceNow and Salesforce, said they were hiring FDEs. These are reminders of the excruciating challenge of getting corporations to make the most of today’s AI capabilities, which are improving seemingly every week. Palantir has long charged customers fees for FDEs to help them develop custom AI applications using data they store with Palantir. But the company’s pricing model of charging customers based on the value or cost savings they get from Palantir software is also appealing, said Max de Groen, a partner at Bain Capital who is working with OpenAI on the AI deployment joint venture. “The type of talent that we're hiring for DeployCo is gonna be some of the top-tier talent and some of the Palantir alums, people who have left Palantir, and others…so we are looking for that level of talent,” he told me. OpenAI acquired a small consulting firm to bolster OpenAI Deployment Company, giving it 150 FDEs as a starting point.
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