Eric Siu discusses how consulting firms using Anthropic's API are inadvertently funding their own competition. The conversation covers vendor risk, token management strategies, and whether firms should build a control plane to arbitrate token usage and routing across AI providers.
If you're running a consulting business and you're deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization, I'm looking at you PwC and Accenture, you are letting the fox into the henhouse. OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them. The consulting businesses that understand this are adopting a control plane that allows them to arbitrate where tokens go and who generates tokens for them. So controlling the tokens, Neil, is controlling the spice, like Dune. I think token optimization and token routing is going to be a core service that companies add. And I actually think you're going to have it. I think I'm going to have it too, as a service.
I don't know if we're going to have it as a service. Genuinely believe that the larger players eventually will help you fine-tune and reduce the cost for you and do it in the most economical way.
