Anthropic is best known for its Claude large language model (LLM), but its enterprise software ambitions are clear as the company builds out its go-to-market team.
The company launched Claude for Financial Services and hired Paul Smith, an alum of ServiceNow, Microsoft and Salesforce. Smith recently stepped down as president of global customer and field operations at ServiceNow. ServiceNow hired him from Salesforce in 2020. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said on the company's first quarter conference all that Smith "scaled our global go-to market organization and together we built a world class team and methodically nurtured the right leaders to take us to 2030 and beyond."
Enterprise software companies typically go horizontal and then drill down into industries. Once you land a big customer in one vertical others often follow. The go-to-market playbook for enterprise computing has worked repeatedly for the likes of Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Microsoft. Cloud providers are following the same path with targeted offerings for multiple industries.
Now Smith will be expected to do the same for Anthropic, which has emerged as the enterprise and B2B AI player relative to more consumer LLM players. OpenAI tries to straddle the line between business and consumer, but leans toward the latter.
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Anthropic's features, which include positioning Claude as a work collaboration partner, indicate it is more about business. The tight partnership with AWS is another enterprise data point.
Daniela Amodei, President of Anthropic, said the hiring of Smith will "strengthen our commercial organization and help more businesses worldwide become AI-native when he starts later this year.”
Smith will already have some of the enterprise parts at Anthropic, which has launched offerings designed for specific industries. At ServiceNow, Smith oversaw expansions into financial services, public sector and telecom to name a few.
Here's a look at the moves from Anthropic that are positioning the company as an enterprise software player.
- Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Services that aims to give finance pros a tool to unify data and feeds with research into a single interface. The aim is to leverage Claude in trading systems, proprietary models, analysis and compliance. Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors will tie financial data and market intelligence together.
- The Department of Defense awarded Anthropic a contract to advance AI in defense operations.
- Anthropic launched Claude for Education with integrations with learning management systems.
- Anthropic has also targeted workers with collaboration features and workspaces.
With Smith on board, you can expect more industry rollouts and then more scaling of sales folks.
