Gate News reports that on March 21, according to Bloomberg, Elon Musk’s xAI is sending engineers directly into potential corporate clients’ offices to compete for customers from OpenAI and Anthropic. This on-site strategy has helped xAI win business from payment company Shift4 Payments. Shift4 CEO Taylor Lauber stated that the company plans to gradually stop using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and switch to xAI’s Grok, while continuing to use Anthropic’s Claude for coding development.
It is worth noting that Shift4 is not purely a market-driven client. The company’s founder, Jared Isaacman, is an ally of Musk and has flown on a SpaceX spacecraft for the world’s first commercial spacewalk. He is currently serving as NASA Administrator. SpaceX’s Starlink is also a client of Shift4. Over the three years since xAI was founded, its clients have mainly been related companies and government agencies under Musk, such as Tesla and SpaceX.
Bloomberg pointed out that xAI’s on-site strategy reflects a common trend in the AI industry: OpenAI and Anthropic are also actively deploying engineers to assist clients, and OpenAI is working with private equity firms to establish a dedicated “deployment department.”