I have just read that Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is reportedly setting up an AI consultancy in Europe, working directly with businesses to help them implement AI. According to the Financial Times report, it is working with private equity firm Hg on the new venture, with hubs planned in London and Berlin.
I am not sure how I feel about that. I have spent the last year building Birdcage Tech, offering bespoke software development, automation and AI integration, so seeing one of the biggest AI companies in the world moving into that space is a bit of a mixed bag.
On one hand, it could be great for raising awareness of what businesses can actually do with AI, and hopefully lead to better tools for people like me who are building solutions with it. On the other, I cannot help wondering how much of the market these companies will eventually take for themselves.
But either way, I think it is quite encouraging that Anthropic sees enough potential in the implementation side of AI to get involved. It is a pretty good indication that there is a market for what I have been trying to build.
There Is Still a Big Gap Between AI and Businesses Actually Using It
Something I have noticed since starting Birdcage Tech is that most people have heard of AI and plenty are using tools like ChatGPT or Claude, but that is often where it stops. They might use it to write emails, summarise documents or help with bits of research, but actually integrating it into how their business operates is another thing entirely. I do not think that is necessarily because businesses are not interested. Often they just do not know what is possible, what it might cost or where to start.
I have had conversations with business owners where they will mention something that is taking up a lot of someone's time, perhaps copying information between systems, manually processing documents or dealing with repetitive customer enquiries. To them it is just part of running the business, something they have always done. But when you start talking through it, there are often fairly straightforward ways to automate some or all of it.
Sometimes that involves AI and sometimes it does not. Quite often the hardest part is not building the solution, but identifying the opportunity in the first place.
That is really the area I have been trying to work in with Birdcage Tech. I am not selling AI for the sake of it. I want to understand what a business does and see whether software or automation could make things easier. The fact that Anthropic is reportedly investing in people who can go into businesses and do exactly that is quite encouraging.
This is not coming from nowhere. Hg said in September that it was extending its existing collaboration with Anthropic, building on work dating back to early 2024. Its announcement described staff enablement, hackathons and AI deployment work across its portfolio. The separate European consultancy is still reported rather than publicly confirmed by either company, but it follows an established implementation relationship.
But What Happens When the Big Players Get Involved?
I suppose this is the part that makes me slightly nervous. Anthropic is not just another software consultancy. It is one of the companies building the actual AI models that the rest of us are using, and it has access to resources that smaller businesses like mine obviously cannot compete with.
There is a possibility that as these companies move further into implementation, they will start offering more complete solutions themselves. As the technology improves, some of the things that currently need a developer or consultant might become much easier for businesses to do on their own. I do not think that is an unreasonable concern if you are building a business around this sort of work.
Having said that, I think the customers Anthropic will be going after are likely to be quite different from mine. The reported venture is aimed at European corporate clients, including companies in Hg's portfolio. Those are likely to be large organisations with complicated systems, big budgets and entire departments dedicated to technology. A lot of the businesses I speak to are much smaller, often without their own development teams, and they are looking for someone who can help with a particular problem without turning it into a massive project.
There is also the question of whether better AI tools actually reduce the need for developers or just change what developers spend their time doing. From my own experience, AI has made a huge difference to how quickly I can build software, but it has not removed the need to understand what I am building or why.
You still need to work out how everything fits together, deal with the things that go wrong, make sure data is handled properly and test that the finished system actually works. Having spent most of my career in software testing and quality assurance, I am probably more conscious of that last bit than most.
The Bit I Find Encouraging
When I decided to start Birdcage Tech, one of the things that gave me the confidence to do it was seeing how much AI was changing software development. I had spent close to 20 years working in software, and suddenly there were tools available that made it possible to build things much faster than before. Projects that might previously have needed a team of developers could sometimes be tackled by one person, and that opens up opportunities to build useful software for businesses that would not previously have been able to justify the cost.
But I also felt there was going to be a growing need for people who could help businesses work out how to use all this technology. Having access to Claude or ChatGPT does not automatically mean you know how to connect it to your accounting software, automate a process or build something that works reliably day after day.
That is why I think this report is significant. Anthropic appears to see value in the implementation side of AI, not just developing and selling the models themselves. It does not necessarily mean there is suddenly going to be unlimited demand for small AI consultancies, and I do not think every business needs AI in the first place. But it does suggest that there is a genuine market for people who can take the technology and make it useful in the real world.
I wrote recently about how bespoke software is becoming more affordable than people might think, and I think the two things are connected. As the tools improve, the cost of building solutions can come down, which makes smaller projects more realistic. A business does not necessarily need to spend tens of thousands of pounds on a big transformation project. Sometimes it is just a case of fixing one frustrating process that has been wasting time for years.
So Is It Good News?
I think on balance it probably is, although I am not completely convinced yet. There is obviously a risk that the big AI companies end up dominating more and more of the market, and it is something I will be keeping an eye on. But if their involvement gets more businesses thinking seriously about what they could automate, and leads to better tools for people like me to build with, then that could be a very good thing.
Ultimately, the thing I keep coming back to is that it validates the reason I started Birdcage Tech in the first place. I believed there was an opportunity to help businesses take advantage of better software development tools and AI without needing huge budgets or their own technical teams. Seeing one of the biggest names in AI moving into the implementation side of the industry makes me feel a bit more confident that I was not completely wrong about that.
Whether I will still feel the same way in a couple of years when Anthropic is potentially competing for customers is another question.
For now, I will keep doing what I am doing, working with businesses to understand where technology could save them time or help them do something they could not do before. If you have something in your business that you think could be automated or improved, I am always happy to have a chat about it. You can also read more about Birdcage Tech's AI consultancy in York.
