Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly turning its engineers into “salesmen”. According to a Bloomberg report, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup behind the Grok chatbot is sending engineers directly to the offices of potential corporate clients to help secure business from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. The report claims that this hands-on strategy has already helped the company that Musk recently merged with SpaceX, see through deals such as Shift4 Payments, which plans to phase out OpenAI’s ChatGPT in favour of xAI’s Grok following on-site collaboration, according to CEO Taylor Lauber. However, the company that was founded by NASA Administrator and Musk ally Jared Isaacman will continue to use Anthropic’s Claude for coding tasks, the report added.xAI’s approach mirrors a wider trend across the AI sector, where companies are reportedly relying on engineers to work closely with clients and ease deployment challenges as they compete to convert businesses into paying users. The report added that OpenAI and Anthropic are also expanding similar efforts, including recruiting engineers for customer-facing roles, while OpenAI is partnering with private equity companies to build a “deployment arm” for its technology.
How xAI is diversifying its business with Shift4 Payments
For much of xAI’s three years, the startup’s clients were largely other Musk ventures, including Tesla and SpaceX, as well as government agencies. Now, Musk’s company is rebuilding parts of its business strategy after a difficult start to the year, during which it merged with SpaceX, lost much of its founding team, and faced a backlash over Grok generating non-consensual explicit images.xAI is in discussions with businesses that need customer service solutions, such as Shift4, Lauber said. xAI similarly helped automate customer service for SpaceX’s satellite internet network provider, Starlink. Representatives for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.Lauber said the xAI team began working with Shift4 in late 2025, setting out a list of problems to solve, including understanding the health of Shift4’s customers and why they might quit the service. The multimillion-dollar contract has led Shift4 to adopt Grok for day-to-day use and to gather data on customer sentiment.“What made xAI’s platform unique is the social signals that they can gather from X itself. We are going live in 15 countries in the next three months, and we couldn’t expand without the AI tools,” Lauber said, referring to the Musk-owned microblogging site X (formerly Twitter) that feeds data to Grok.Isaacman, who stepped down from Shift4 in late 2025, performed the first commercial spacewalk in a mission operated by Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink is also a customer of Shift4, Bloomberg has reported.
