Inside Ode with Anthropic, the private equity-backed startup betting AI services are the future of enterprise

Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, the applied AI services startup that Ode acquired earlier this year to serve as the new venture’s core. The three discuss why so many enterprise AI pilots never make it to production and why they think AI-native services are about to become one of the biggest categories in tech.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

• The case for AI-native services, and why Ode believes small teams of applied AI engineers can unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in business value.

• Why the company is hiring experienced generalists and former founders instead of AI researchers, and how it's turning them into elite FDEs.

• Whether an AI services company can scale like software, yet maintain a boutique feel, and why Taylor believes Ode could one day become a trillion-dollar business.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:30 Fractional AI becomes "Ode with Anthropic"

1:13 Why non-AI companies are the real AI winners

2:04 Working with Blackstone, Anthropic, and beyond

3:05 Inside a real project: fixing LogicGate's bottleneck

7:29 How long does it take from hypothesis to production?

9:19 Measuring ROI: revenue, efficiency, and evals

16:37 Model choice vs. workflow redesign, and why it's Claude-first

23:10 Hiring generalists over specialized AI talent

26:39 Can this scale without turning into another consulting firm?

30:49 Outro

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