A small team, a big bet: Ode and Anthropic want to replace whole consulting firms with a few sharp engineers
A new joint venture is planting AI specialists inside large companies, backed by some of the biggest names in finance. Whether a tiny crew armed with the right tools can outperform an army of traditional consultants is the real test.
Key points
- Ode with Anthropic is a joint venture that places specialised AI engineers directly inside large companies to build and run AI projects.
- Backers include Anthropic (the AI safety company behind the Claude family of AI assistants), Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs.
- Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel lead the venture; both previously ran Fractional AI.
- The core argument is that a small group of well-equipped engineers can deliver results that once required hundreds of traditional consultants.
Imagine hiring an entire floor of consultants to modernise how your business works, then replacing that floor with six engineers and a very good AI. That's the pitch behind Ode with Anthropic, a new joint venture that's attracted serious Wall Street and Silicon Valley money.
The idea is called "forward deployment." Instead of a consulting firm sending a report from a distant office, Ode's engineers embed directly inside a client company and build AI tools using Claude, Anthropic's family of AI assistants, as the core technology.
Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel lead Ode. They previously founded Fractional AI, built on the same basic premise: put skilled AI builders inside the businesses that need them. Taylor and Siegel discussed the venture with TechCrunch's Equity podcast. As our earlier story noted, knowing how to use AI is now arguably worth as much as building it.
The money behind it is hard to ignore. Anthropic itself is a backer, meaning the company that builds the AI the engineers rely on also has a financial stake in the model's success. Blackstone, one of the world's largest private equity firms, is in. So are Hellman and Friedman and Goldman Sachs.
Why should ordinary workers care about this?
If Ode's model works, it changes who does large tech projects and what they cost. Traditional consulting engagements can run into millions and take years. A leaner, AI-assisted team promises faster results at lower cost. For employees at large firms, that could mean faster internal tool upgrades or, depending on how you look at it, fewer external contractor roles.
There's a clear risk here too. Small teams move fast but can miss what a larger group would catch. Embedding engineers inside a client means earning trust quickly, navigating complex internal politics, and delivering visible wins before the contract runs out.
No public figures have been released on contract sizes or which enterprise clients have signed on. Those numbers, when they arrive, will be the real verdict.
This is a well-funded hypothesis: that AI tools have reached the point where a handful of skilled people can do work that once took a small army. The hypothesis isn't proven yet, and the consultancies it aims to displace aren't standing still.
