A New AI Superagent Race Is Pitting OpenAI and Anthropic Against Microsoft and Salesforce

Even as Anthropic and OpenAI unnerve stock market investors with business-focused AI products that could undermine existing enterprise software firms, the software incumbents are trying to catch up. Companies ranging from Microsoft to ServiceNow and Snowflake have come out with products designed to help customers develop AI agents, sometimes called digital co-workers, that can use a variety of enterprise apps just as humans do.

But that’s not all. As the chart below demonstrates, almost all of the AI and software companies are selling agent-building tools that enable customers to cobble together different custom AI agents for their specific needs. And the tech companies are also vying to sell an application customers use to manage the growing suite of AI agents they’re employing from various vendors.