WELCOME, EXECUTIVES AND PROFESSIONALS.

According to a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, a new enterprise LLM leader has emerged as both usage and spend continue to surge.

Since the previous edition, we’ve reviewed hundreds of the latest agentic and generative AI best practices, case studies, market dynamics and innovation insights. Here’s the top 1%...

Note: Effective August 17, 2025, the name of this briefing (appearing above/next to the subject line in your inbox) will change to Enterprise AI Executive. The content and sender email address will remain unchanged.

In today’s briefing:

• Anthropic’s enterprise momentum continues.

• Salesforce unveils agentic AI playbook.

• OpenAI reveals how Intercom built AI advantages.

• Microsoft’s CIO AI agent governance playbook.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

MARKET INSIGHT

Anthropic’s enterprise momentum continues

Brief: Menlo Ventures surveyed 150+ tech leaders (June 30–July 10, 2025) to assess the enterprise LLM market. Since Nov 2024, Model API spend surged from $3.5B to $8.4B, but usage trends reveal the true market dynamics.

Breakdown:

• Anthropic leads enterprise LLM API usage with 32% market share, surpassing OpenAI (25%) and Google (20%) after OAI’s 50% 20023 lead.

• Anthropic leads AI code generation with 42% share, 2x OpenAI, driven by strong demand for this breakout enterprise use case.

• Anthropic's Claude API helps power leading AI IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf), app builders (Replit, Bolt), and custom enterprise applications.

• Open-source fell from 19% to 16%, with Meta’s Llama 4 underperforming, and western firms cautious about Chinese models, despite advancements.

• 66% of enterprises stay within their vendor when upgrading, and 49% report most compute is now inference-led, up from 29% last year.

Why it’s important: Anthropic is gaining enterprise momentum, driven by AI coding’s product-market fit. Still, context matters: survey scope (excludes tools like ChatGPT Enterprise), undisclosed respondent locations, competing studies (e.g. a16z’s May survey showing OpenAI’s lead), and VC investment ties.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

Salesforce unveils agentic AI transformation playbook

Brief: Salesforce released a playbook for becoming an agentic enterprise, sharing successes, challenges, customer stories, and downloadable accelerators, to help organizations turn AI ambition into real change.

Breakdown:

• The playbook maps agentic AI readiness with a maturity model, leadership shifts, and strategic pillars for leveraging AI agents in the enterprise.

• Prepare your workforce for agent collaboration with Salesforce’s "four R’s": Redesigning, reskilling, redeploying, and rebalancing.

• Identify high-impact starting points using an structured use case framework focused on outcomes and measurable business value.

• Transform data into an asset through effective governance while unlocking the “dual dividend” of human potential and customer loyalty.

• Learn from companies like Indeed and WeWork and apply insights using downloadable accelerators like the AI vision statement.

Why it’s important: Salesforce’s playbook offers a roadmap for agentic transformation, from vision to execution. It helps enterprises unlock AI’s “dual dividend,” and positions them to evolve toward the future advanced agent environments, robotics and “enterprise general intelligence” (EGI).

CASE STUDY

OpenAI reveals how Intercom built AI advantages

Brief: OpenAI revealed how Intercom built an AI customer service platform by staying rigorous in evaluation, grounded in performance, and flexible in design, offering lessons for other enterprises building with LLMs.

Breakdown:

• Intercom built Fin, an AI agent that now resolves millions of customer queries monthly and ships new capabilities in days, not quarters.

• Experiment early and often. GPT-4.1 outperformed GPT‑4o (reasoning) for refunds, delivering more reliable, cheaper, and faster outcomes.

• Measure what works, and why. Fin is benchmarked on real chats to assess brand tone and functionality, then validated with live A/B testing.

• Fin’s flexible architecture supports multimodal inputs, routes complex queries, and enables model switching without reengineering.

• Intercom is expanding beyond customer support, bringing faster resolutions and better experiences across support, ops and product teams.

Why it’s important: Intercom's leadership acted decisively: redirecting resources from non-AI work, forming a cross-functional task force, and investing $100M to replatform the business. Their experience offers practical insights, especially for companies aiming to transform customer experience.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Microsoft’s CIO AI agent governance playbook

Brief: Microsoft released a 40-slide CIO playbook on expediting Copilot Studio and agent adoption by leveraging Power Platform foundations, a low-code suite used by 97% of Fortune 500 companies to automate knowledge work.

Breakdown:

• Agents create opportunities but also risks. CIOs should govern them like digital labor: assign trackable IDs, define roles, and monitor performance.

• Extend your Power Platform foundation to unify governance across agents, apps, and automation, ensuring consistency and reducing duplication.

• Use a Zoned Governance Model: centralized policy with progressive autonomy across personal productivity, collaboration, and enterprise.

• Culture will make or break your agent strategy. Invest in role-based training and communities to help teams learn, share, and scale.

• The playbook includes a CIO checklist, plus additional resources on agent cost control, governance, and implementation.

Why it’s important: CIOs are uniquely positioned to lead the agent shift, evolving Power Platform governance where it serves the enterprise, enabling agent autonomy, AI-driven decisions, and responsible AI, while placing strategic bets on emerging players in a rapidly evolving AI-native ecosystem.

BCG shared how four firms cut costs with AI, sped up agent deployment with MCP, and how AI introduces cyber risks, but can help solve them too.

C3 AI used agentic AI to streamline 3D modeling and simulation, reducing model validation time, scaling operations, and unlocking $65M in value.

Forrester explored the arrival of AI-native cloud, why gen AI isn’t the silver bullet for customer service yet, and the gap between gen AI and AI agents.

McKinsey showed how gen AI helps firms leapfrog from selling data to building robust data products that deliver actionable intelligence.

Menlo Ventures outlined how AI agents disrupt traditional software security models, yet unlock new ways to building security technologies.

AWS outlined the AI-Driven Development Life Cycle (ADLC): what it is, why it's needed, how it works, and benefits from velocity to developer experience.

Salesforce surveyed 314 execs on agentic AI adoption, plus insights on why AI agents and RAG pipelines often fail in production (and how to fix them).

ISG published its AI Agents 2025 Buyers Guide, evaluating the products and customer experience of vendors like Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta’s new AI vision is to “bring personal superintelligence to everyone,” while hinting it may not open top models.

Amazon is reportedly paying $20–25M annually to license New York Times content for AI training and use within its AI platforms.

Microsoft is nearing a deal to retain OpenAI tech access post-AGI milestone. It also launched ‘Copilot Mode’ in Edge to search tabs and take proactive actions.

OpenAI is projected to hit $12B in revenue for 2025, with 700M weekly ChatGPT users. CEO Sam Altman said there’s no legal confidentiality for chats.

Writer launched Action Agent, an enterprise AI agent that executes in its own environment, outperforming Manus and OAI Deep Research on benchmarks.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shared that Google processed 980 trillion tokens across its AI products in June, more than doubling from May.

Z.ai, a Chinese startup, launched GLM-4.5, an open-source AI undercutting DeepSeek’s pricing while nearing leading closed model performance.

Anthropic is raising $5B at a $170B valuation led by Iconiq, nearly 3x March’s value. Claude usage limits now apply, affecting under 5% of Pro/Max users.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Takeda - Head of Data & AI Enablement

Moody's - Head of AI Workforce Enablement

BCG - Global AI Security Director

EVENTS

Anthropic - Scale with AI Agents - August 6, 2025

C-Vision - Scaling Gen AI Exec Dinner - August 13, 2025

Google Cloud - Agentic AI Security - August 21, 2025

Originally conceived as a practical communication for executives the editor, Lewis Walker, has worked with, this briefing now serves as a trusted resource for thousands of senior decision-makers shaping the future of enterprise AI.

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