Google shifts strategy: licensing agreement over consultancy

OpenAI has constructed a ten-billion-dollar consulting operation. Anthropic has built a 1.5-billion-dollar consulting business. Google, meanwhile, is choosing to draft a licensing agreement. The strategic divergence among these AI labs could determine which one captures the most significant new enterprise distribution channel to emerge since the dawn of cloud computing: the portfolio companies controlled by the world’s largest private equity firms.

Rather than embedding its AI technology through a traditional consulting model, Google is pursuing a direct licensing deal with major private equity players like Blackstone and KKR. This approach bypasses the need for a large, in-house consulting workforce. Instead, it treats AI capabilities as a scalable product that portfolio companies can license directly.

The implications are substantial. The consulting model, favored by OpenAI and Anthropic, requires building a massive team of experts to tailor and deploy solutions for each client. This creates high barriers to entry and generates recurring revenue from services, but it is also resource-intensive and slower to scale. Google’s licensing strategy, in contrast, is designed for rapid, widespread adoption. By offering a standardized AI product to a vast network of companies, Google can achieve massive distribution without the overhead of a consulting arm.

This difference in approach will likely define the next phase of enterprise AI competition. The winner may not be the one with the most advanced model, but the one that most effectively unlocks the largest captive enterprise market available today.