Microsoft is reportedly telling its sales team to highlight what it sees as the weaknesses of rival OpenAI and Anthropic as the competition in the AI market intensifies. According to a Bloomberg report, the software giant has asked its employees to position Microsoft’s AI offerings as a complete end-to-end platform while arguing that competing products are more limited. During an internal sales meeting, Microsoft Executive Vice President Jay Parikh urged employees to focus on the company’s integrated AI platform. “Everyone else is selling parts — we’re selling the full end-to-end system. That’s the story that we all need to get out there and tell in FY27,” Parikh said, according to a transcript reviewed by the publication.
Microsoft tells sales team how to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic
During the meeting, executives said Microsoft offers lower costs, stronger security and a broader AI ecosystem. The software giant is positioning itself as a platform that helps businesses build, customise, deploy and monitor AI applications.Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou also compared Microsoft’s Copilot with Anthropic’s Claude for Microsoft Office tasks. According to Bloomberg, Andreou said Claude was slower, less accurate and lacked key security integrations.“We know that everyone here is competing every day with products from OpenAI and Anthropic,” Andreou said. He added that his team is working hard “to make Copilot the application even more competitive”.
What Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told sales team
According to the report, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told a group of employees that managing AI costs will become a key concern for customers over the next year. During the meeting, Nadella cited consumer goods company Unilever as an example, saying it built an automated claims processing system on Microsoft’s AI platform that is expected to save about $300 million. He further stated that the company later switched from a more advanced AI model to a lower-cost Microsoft model.
