Elon Musk’s xAI is sending engineers directly into the offices of prospective corporate clients in an attempt to claw business customers away from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
The hands-on approach helped xAI land payments company Shift4 Payments, which now plans to phase out OpenAI’s ChatGPT in favor of xAI’s Grok after the on-site work, Shift4 Chief Executive Officer Taylor Lauber said in an interview. The firm, founded by NASA Administrator and Musk ally Jared Isaacman, will continue using Anthropic’s Claude for coding, Lauber added.
xAI’s white-glove strategy mirrors a broader shift across the AI industry as leading developers race to convince more businesses to pay up for their products. AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are actively recruiting and deploying engineers to work with potential customers and ease adoption of their software. The ChatGPT maker is also teaming up with private equity firms to build a “deployment arm” for its technology.
For much of xAI’s three-year existence, the startup’s clients were mainly other Musk ventures, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, as well as government agencies. Now, Musk’s company is rebuilding key parts of its business strategy after a turbulent start to the year, during which it merged with SpaceX, lost much of its founding team and faced a global uproar over Grok generating non-consensual explicit images.
xAI is in discussions with businesses that need customer service solutions, such as Shift4, Lauber said. xAI similarly helped automate customer service for SpaceX’s satellite internet network provider, Starlink. Representatives for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Lauber said the xAI team started working with Shift4 in late 2025, setting out a list of problems to solve, including understanding the health of the payment firm’s consumers and why they would quit their service. The multimillion-dollar contract has led to Shift4 adopting Grok for day-to-day use, as well as to gather data on customer sentiment.
“What made xAI’s platform unique is the social signals that they can gather from X itself,” Lauber said, referring to the Musk-owned social network that feeds data to Grok. “We are going live in 15 countries in the next three months and we couldn’t expand without the AI tools.”
Isaacman, who stepped down from Shift4 in late 2025, performed the world’s first commercial space walk in a mission operated by Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink is also a customer of Shift4, Bloomberg has reported.
The hands-on approach helped xAI land payments company Shift4 Payments, which now plans to phase out OpenAI’s ChatGPT in favor of xAI’s Grok after the on-site work, Shift4 Chief Executive Officer Taylor Lauber said in an interview. The firm, founded by NASA Administrator and Musk ally Jared Isaacman, will continue using Anthropic’s Claude for coding, Lauber added.
xAI’s white-glove strategy mirrors a broader shift across the AI industry as leading developers race to convince more businesses to pay up for their products. AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are actively recruiting and deploying engineers to work with potential customers and ease adoption of their software. The ChatGPT maker is also teaming up with private equity firms to build a “deployment arm” for its technology.
For much of xAI’s three-year existence, the startup’s clients were mainly other Musk ventures, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, as well as government agencies. Now, Musk’s company is rebuilding key parts of its business strategy after a turbulent start to the year, during which it merged with SpaceX, lost much of its founding team and faced a global uproar over Grok generating non-consensual explicit images.
xAI is in discussions with businesses that need customer service solutions, such as Shift4, Lauber said. xAI similarly helped automate customer service for SpaceX’s satellite internet network provider, Starlink. Representatives for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Lauber said the xAI team started working with Shift4 in late 2025, setting out a list of problems to solve, including understanding the health of the payment firm’s consumers and why they would quit their service. The multimillion-dollar contract has led to Shift4 adopting Grok for day-to-day use, as well as to gather data on customer sentiment.
“What made xAI’s platform unique is the social signals that they can gather from X itself,” Lauber said, referring to the Musk-owned social network that feeds data to Grok. “We are going live in 15 countries in the next three months and we couldn’t expand without the AI tools.”
Isaacman, who stepped down from Shift4 in late 2025, performed the world’s first commercial space walk in a mission operated by Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink is also a customer of Shift4, Bloomberg has reported.
