- Microsoft sees itself as cheaper and more effective at bundling the full stack
- The company is clearly pushing its own internal models
- Claude also slated for being slower and less accurate
Microsoft is reportedly teaching sales workers how to compare the company's AI offerings to rival companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Per Bloomberg reporting, the company's sales staff are being told to emphasize benefits like efficiency and cost advantages when using Microsoft's offerings, which offer a much fuller picture than just the models and tools, extending to compute and other workflow tools.
"Everyone else is selling parts – we’re selling the full end-to-end system," EVP Jay Parikh reportedly told workers. "That’s the story that we all need to get out there and tell in FY27."
Microsoft sales teams up the ante against OpenAI, Anthropic
Clearly, the company wants customers to see the combination of its own models and third-party models, cloud infrastructure, applications and security as better value compared with having to piece these elements together separately.
Copilot EVP Jacob Andreou also reportedly compared Copilot to Claude, accusing Claude of being slower, less accurate and missing certain security integrations.
The sales push comes at a time of change for the company, which has started to push more of its own internal models across different apps and workflows to replace OpenAI and Anthropic models. It's also a marked shift from the company's earlier AI strategy, which leaned heavily on its multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI.
Company CEO Satya Nadella also pointed at a major customer, Unilever, which recently switched form an unnamed frontier model to one of Microsoft's own cheaper models to make significant savings.
In April, the company announced that its AI business is now worth around $37 billion annually, marking a 123% year-over-year increase.
