Why are AI companies sending their own engineers into workplaces like yours?

Anthropic and OpenAI are building consultancy firms that send their own engineers inside other businesses to install AI into the tools employees already use. Anthropic has agreed to back its first European consultancy with London investment firm Hg, with offices planned in London and Berlin by the end of the year.

Picture this: you open the same spreadsheet program you've used for years, and there's a shiny new AI button in the corner that offers to write summaries for you. Nobody from IT announced it. It just showed up — because an outside AI team quietly set it up.That's the newest move from the world's biggest AI labs.

Instead of just selling chatbot subscriptions and hoping companies figure them out, labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are now building consultancy firms that send their own engineers inside other businesses to install AI into the tools employees already use. The Financial Times reports Anthropic has agreed to back its first European consultancy, teaming up with London investment firm Hg. The new firm will place consultants and engineers inside European companies, with offices planned in London and Berlin by the end of the year.Why are they doing this?

Selling the software turned out to be the easy part — getting hundreds of employees to actually change how they work is hard. Plenty of companies bought AI and then barely used it. So the labs decided to sell the hand-holding too: send in experts, wire the AI into a company's own files and systems, train the staff — and their AI becomes the one your whole office depends on.This is a stampede, not one company.

Anthropic's American consultancy, Ode, launched in May with about $1.5 billion in investor backing. OpenAI launched its own Deployment Company the same month with more than $4 billion from 19 investors — and bought a London consultancy called Tomoro, bringing in roughly 150 engineers, to hit the ground running.What it means for regular workers:1. New AI features will keep appearing inside software you already use — email, spreadsheets, word processors, customer-service tools — often with little warning.2.

Expect short training sessions, plus new workplace rules about what you may and may not paste into an AI tool.3. Routine work like first drafts, summaries, and data cleanup will get automated, so the human part of many jobs shifts toward checking, fixing, and dealing with people.Pro tip: don't wait for your employer. Spend ten minutes this week trying the AI features already built into the apps on your own computer, and ask your manager one question: "What's our policy on using AI at work?" Knowing the rules early makes you the person coworkers come to for help.Ad's take: I've watched tech waves come and go, and the folks who do fine are never the ones who panic or the ones who ignore it — they're the ones who poke at the new button for ten minutes and learn what it does.

This wave is coming to offices whether it's announced or not, so you might as well meet it on your feet.