BroadChain has learned that on March 21, Bloomberg reported Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, is taking a direct approach to win enterprise clients: sending its engineers directly to potential customers' offices. This on-site strategy is aimed at competing with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC and has already secured business from payment processor Shift4 Payments.
Shift4's CEO, Taylor Lauber, stated the company plans to gradually replace OpenAI's ChatGPT with xAI's Grok, while continuing to use Anthropic's Claude for code development.
However, Shift4's decision isn't purely market-driven. The company's founder, Jared Isaacman, is a longtime associate of Musk—having completed the world's first commercial spacewalk aboard a SpaceX spacecraft—and currently serves as a NASA administrator. Furthermore, SpaceX's Starlink is itself a Shift4 customer.
Throughout its three-year history, xAI's client base has largely consisted of Musk-affiliated companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, as well as some government agencies.
Bloomberg notes that xAI's hands-on engineering tactic reflects a broader industry trend, with OpenAI and Anthropic also deploying engineers to assist clients with implementation. OpenAI is further collaborating with private equity firms to create specialized "deployment teams."