Microsoft appears to be prepping its sales team to get more competitive with the other major players in the AI industry.
At an internal meeting on Tuesday, the company’s executives outlined a plan for salespeople to negatively compare AI products from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to its own, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The meeting, billed as a strategy session for the new fiscal year, reportedly leaned heavily on pitching the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Microsoft’s in-house models against those of its rivals.
“Everyone else is selling parts — we’re selling the full end-to-end system. That’s the story that we all need to get out there and tell in FY27,” Executive Vice President Jay Parikh reportedly told the room.
Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou reportedly went further, delivering a presentation comparing Copilot directly to Anthropic’s chatbot Claude. According to Bloomberg, Andreou noted that, when it came to performance within Microsoft’s office apps, Anthropic’s model was “slower and less accurate, and lacked the proper security integrations,” Bloomberg writes.
TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft and Anthropic for comment and will update this story if we hear from either outfit.
