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. The question is whether a tiny crew armed with the right tools can outperform an army of traditional consultants.
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.
- The venture was founded by Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who previously ran a company called 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. Now imagine replacing that floor with six engineers and a very good AI. That is the pitch behind Ode with Anthropic, a new joint venture that has 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, learn its systems, and build AI tools on the spot. They use Claude, Anthropic's family of AI assistants, as the core technology.
Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel lead Ode. The pair previously founded Fractional AI, a company built on the same basic premise: put skilled AI builders inside the businesses that need them, rather than advising from the outside. TechCrunch AI first covered the venture in a podcast interview with both founders.
The money behind it is hard to ignore. Anthropic itself is a backer, which means the company that builds the AI the engineers rely on also has a financial stake in making the model work. Blackstone, one of the world's largest private equity firms, is in. So are Hellman and Friedman, a buyout specialist, and Goldman Sachs, the investment bank.
Why should ordinary workers care about this?
If Ode's model works, it changes how companies spend money on big tech projects, and who does that work. Traditional consulting engagements can cost 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.
The model also carries a clear risk. Small teams can move fast, but they can also miss things that a larger group would catch. Embedding engineers inside a client company means those engineers need to earn trust quickly, understand complex internal politics, and deliver visible wins before the contract runs out.
No public figures have been released yet on contract sizes, team headcounts, or which enterprise clients have signed on. Those numbers, when they arrive, will tell us whether the bet is paying off.
For now, the venture 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.
