Anthropic Says Its AI Can Replace Enterprise Apps Like Slack
When AI coding tools came into vogue in 2023 and 2024, chief information officers salivated at the idea of using them to develop their own versions of Salesforce and Slack and stop paying a fortune for enterprise apps. But the AI wasn’t accurate or consistent enough to do that.
Now Anthropic is reawakening these app-replacement dreams. In a recent test, Anthropic used its Claude AI model to create a workplace chat app similar to Slack, said Sholto Douglas, the company’s tech lead for reinforcement learning, at The Information’s AI Agenda Live event Tuesday.
Douglas said Anthropic has been sharpening Claude’s coding skills using RL, where the AI gets automatic feedback from another AI model on how well it solved specific technical problems. In a separate video this week, Anthropic showed how its new model might copy enterprise apps: the company used it to clone the Claude chatbot app, which competes with ChatGPT.
Anthropic is increasingly marketing these capabilities to its corporate customers.
“We think that coding is the most economically important and immediately tractable area [for AI], so it's where Anthropic has devoted its focus,” Douglas said.
Anthropic isn’t alone—Elon Musk has been making a similar pitch, claiming in several posts since August that his company xAI will take aim at Microsoft and other enterprise software vendors and “simulate them entirely with AI.” Musk dubbed the effort “Macrohard,” but said that despite the jokey name, “the product is very real.”
Still, many software executives aren’t sold. Large companies are likely to resist tossing out the legacy applications they use because overhauling how most of their employees work, and moving business data into the new, vibe-coded apps would be too costly and time-consuming, according to AMD head of global markets Keith Strier, who previously served as a vice president at Nvidia and EY.
“I don‘t think a large scale $10 billion or $50 billion company is gonna suddenly drop ServiceNow and drop SAP and say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna just use the agents. That’s just not going to happen,’” Stier said during a separate panel at AI Agenda Live.
But he noted that vibe coding enterprise software will likely prove more useful in replacing legacy enterprise apps for younger startups that “have huge valuations but have 50 times less people.”
Some AI startup founders are similarly skeptical. Kabir Nagrecha, cofounder and CEO of IT software startup Tessera Labs, said he thinks automation will focus more on building agents that can use existing apps like Salesforce or SAP rather than replace them.
“The deal disruption is not at the software level, it's at the user level of that software and rethinking what is the role of that user to interact with an SAP, what is the role of a maintainer of SAP, how do we interact with software, not the software itself,” Nagrecha said during the same panel.
As Anthropic tries to push the boundaries of what AI coding can do, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar effort from OpenAI, which has pitched its own AI coding tools as capable of creating anything from websites to internal company apps.
JPMorgan Launches PR Offensive
It’s that time of the cycle again: Big banks are talking publicly about how tech-forward they are, this time with AI.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., for instance, told CNBC it has big plans for using AI to operate more efficiently and get an edge on rivals. Derek Waldron, the bank’s chief data analytics officer, said the bank is using AI to help employees create presentations and complete work projects that involve multiple steps.
Waldron went even further, saying JPMorgan will soon use AI from OpenAI and Anthropic to handle interactions with customers, like helping them find information.
His comments are the latest example of how banks, which used to be reluctant to talk publicly about their adoption of new tech for competitive reasons, are now being more open about using AI in customer-facing situations. Wells Fargo is also using AI from Google in a virtual assistant it provides to customers.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re spending all that much on the technology. When banks like JPMorgan began talking about how much they were embracing cloud-based servers, in reality, they were spending relatively little compared to many other types of cloud customers.
JPMorgan also has a big financial incentive to talk up OpenAI in particular: the bank has committed $10 billion to finance data centers OpenAI will use in Texas.
All of which is to say that Waldron's comment about JPM being “fundamentally rewired” for AI might not mean it will be a heavy spender on the technology in the foreseeable future.