There’s a new flavor of implementation consulting making its way out to the market. It’s a joint project of Anthropic and consulting firms like Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, and it purports to be a solution for helping client companies to figure out how to “add AI” to their plans.
A press release from the stakeholders describes this new entity as an “AI-native enterprise services firm,” the type of which, by definition, could only have been created in the past five or six years.
Strangely enough, the same press release does not refer to the project by name: I had to do more digging to find out that they’re calling this juggernaut “Ode,” as in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or “Ode to Strange Combinations of Managed Services.”
What Will It Do?
Ode, into which the partners have injected some $1.5 billion, is going to bring AI to what have been more conventional relationships between Goldman and Blackstone, and their clients.
I talked to a few people, and read a few things, and came up with this contrast:
Classically, Goldman is basically an investment bank and asset manager. It might help a client to raise debt or equity, advise on an acquisition or sale, or noodle about how to take a company public. Goldman might help to restructure a company or its finances, or float a bond, or advise executives on major strategic financial decisions.
Blackstone, for its part, has been an asset manager, the kind of consultant that helps companies to buy through private equity, provides private credit, or consult on real estate acquisitions, or infrastructure.
Ode, for its part, will be an AI implementation service. Imagine a consultant that can identify Claude-ready business processes or workflows, adding AI engineers in with the company’s in-house employees, building custom applications and agents, automating tasks and processes … you get the idea.
Another part of this service will be dealing regulatory and compliance issues, both of which can involve moving targets.
An Ode by Any Other Name
When I asked GPT about why they call it “Ode” the model had this to say:
“An ode is traditionally a poem written in praise or celebration of something. That fits the venture’s positioning: Anthropic creates the frontier technology, while Ode is supposed to turn that technology into something useful and tangible in the real economy. Ode’s own launch language says that ‘the best models in the world don’t put themselves to work’ and describes its mission as bringing Anthropic’s technology into companies.”
That makes sense to me. The response also included this quote from top brass:
“There’s also a pretty explicit clue from Blackstone executive Rodney Zemmel,” GPT replied. “When announcing the name, he wrote that Ode was already ‘creating poetry in our portfolio.’” (Here’s the sourcing)
That’s the sort of thing I was looking for. Many of us are in favor of any allusion to the humanities, because we worry that in the whirlwind days of the 2020s, they’re going away. We’re not in stasis here, we’re in frenetic change.
Internal Enthusiasm
The firms involved have high hopes for Ode, given their catalogs of existing customers, and all of the potential for moving confidently ahead with AI.
“Companies everywhere see the potential for what AI can do for their businesses, the challenge is making it real,” said Ode CEO Chris Taylor, as quoted in the announcement. “Our teams partner closely with CEOs and across organizations to define and execute the highest priority AI initiatives. By pairing the deep subject matter expertise of our clients with our top applied AI talent, we’re able to drive transformation level impact. There’s enormous demand for Anthropic’s technology, and we’re scaling quickly to help clients adopt AI with a focus on outcomes.”
“As mid-size companies move from experimenting with AI to building it into their operations, they need partners with real implementation depth and a clear understanding of how their businesses actually work,” added Anthropic Head of Forward Deployed Engineering Garvan Doyle. “Ode was built to be that partner, adding to Anthropic’s growing ecosystem of partners that help enterprises put Claude to work.”
It’s that “growing ecosystem of partners” that the makers are banking on, along with the moment that we are now in. Ode represents the desire to strike while that iron is hot. Let’s see how it rolls out.