CNBC's Deirdre Bosa reports on pressures facing the AI enterprise agent narrative and how the artificial intelligence leaderboard is shifting.

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

Recent developments indicate that major AI players, including Microsoft and OpenAI, are re-evaluating their focus on AI agent products, with both companies signaling a shift toward core model usage and workflow automation. Microsoft has publicly disputed reports of lowered AI sales targets and announced a significant investment in Anthropic, whose Claude model is experiencing strong enterprise adoption driven by API usage rather than agents.

Data from Ramp highlights that while agent products face deployment challenges, overall enterprise AI usage continues to grow, benefiting companies like Anthropic. Amazon's early partnership with Anthropic is also proving strategic as more enterprises adopt Claude, and industry observers note that the anticipated returns from AI agents may take longer to materialize than initially expected.

Pressure growing on the AI Agent narrative

Microsoft share is under some pressure, but off of the lows of the day after reporting from our own Steve Kovach, Microsoft pushing back on these reports that has lowered its AI software sales targets. The company out with a new statement a few moments ago saying the information story inaccurately combines the concepts of growth and sales quotas, which shows their lack of understanding of the way a sales organization works and is compensated. Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered as we informed them prior to publication. The information updating its headline to say instead that it's lowering its software growth targets. Meantime, we're getting some fresh data from Ramp on enterprise AI spending and what it might mean for the so-called agent economy. And for that, we'll turn to Deirdre Bosa and today's tech check. Hey, De. Hey, morning, Carl. So what the data shows is that this isn't just a Microsoft story. This may be a reset moment for the agent economy at large. Even Sam Altman in his internal Code Red memo that we've been talking about, he said that OpenAI will shift resources away from agents to fix the core chat GPT experience. So you have two of the biggest AI players tempering expectations around these new agent products or put simply workflow automation. Now, that new data from Ramp, it shows, however, that Anthropic just saw one of its biggest monthly gains in AI enterprise adoption, while OpenAI, still the leader, is seeing its growth moderate. But it isn't chatbots or agents for Anthropic. The data says that the real growth is in API spend. So put another way, guys, agents are top down. They're sold to executives. APIs, they're bottom up, adopted by the builders at these organizations. And that is a key distinction because enterprise agents, they may be hitting friction, but usage as a whole is not. And that is where Anthropic is winning. Now, it raises big questions for Microsoft. Did it bet too heavily on one partner? It spent the last few years building its enterprise AI story around OpenAI. But the fastest growing enterprise model today is Anthropic's Claude. And Microsoft knows it. Last month, the company announced it will invest up to five billion dollars in Anthropic. Really a clear move to reduce its dependence on OpenAI and cover its bases in a multi-model future. It's worth pointing out. Amazon got there first. AWS has been Anthropic's primary cloud and training partner for years. And with enterprise adoption accelerating, according to that data, that early bet is looking more and more strategic. So, guys, the bottom line for investors, that early hype around agents was hype. But the real money right now is in model usage. That doesn't mean that agents won't get there. But they may be proving more complicated to deploy at scale than people appreciated. I had one person in tech tell me that it's not the year of the agent. It's the decade of the agent. So that can imply investors may have to wait a little longer to see that ROI. And how does it work with the companies? I mean, how competitive is it really? We were just having this conversation with someone who worked at OpenAI. But are these companies using multiple agents and multiple, multiple companies like an Anthropic and an OpenAI and a Microsoft? Can they employ them all or is it just one versus the other? Whichever has the better model right now? Yeah, I mean, you hear often that kind of enterprises are model agnostic. They'll use the one that best serves their purposes. But what I hear is that in a lot of those cases, it ends up being Claude, you know, enterprises, developers. Claude seems to be gaining. And also it may lead to profitability sooner. Right. When you have this dynamic of when will or won't OpenAI and Anthropic go public? Could they IPO around a similar timing? Obviously, the profits piece is going to be extremely important. I think it was a journal report not too long ago saying that this enterprise adoption and the popularity of Claude may actually help Anthropic get there sooner.

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Pressure growing on the AI Agent narrative

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