- Microsoft sees itself as cheaper and more efficient at bundling the whole package.
- The company is clearly pushing its own internal models.
- Claude was also criticized for being slower and less accurate.
Microsoft is reportedly teaching sales workers how to compare the company’s AI offerings with rival companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
By Bloomberg The company’s sales staff are reportedly being asked to emphasize benefits such as efficiency and cost advantages when using Microsoft’s offerings, which offer a much more complete picture than just the models and tools, extending to computing and other workflow tools.
“Everyone else is selling parts; we’re selling the entire end-to-end system,” executive vice president Jay Parikh reportedly told workers. “That’s the story we all need to go out and tell in FY27.”
Microsoft sales teams up the ante against OpenAI and Anthropic
Clearly, the company wants customers to see the combination of its own and third-party models, cloud infrastructure, applications and security as a better value compared to having to put these elements together separately.
Copilot Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou also reportedly compared Copilot to Claude, accusing Claude of being slower, less accurate, and missing certain security integrations.
The sales push comes at a time of change for the company, which has begun pushing more of its own internal models across different applications and workflows to replace the OpenAI and Anthropic models. It’s also a marked shift from the company’s previous AI strategy, which leaned heavily on its multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI.
The company’s CEO Satya Nadella also pointed to a major customer, Unilever, which recently switched from a no-name frontier model to one of Microsoft’s cheaper models to achieve significant savings.
In April, the company announced that its AI business is now worth about $37 billion annually, up 123% year-over-year.
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