xAI is sending engineers directly to potential clients’ offices to lure companies away from OpenAI and Anthropic. The approach has already yielded its first contract: payment company Shift4 Payments is switching from ChatGPT to Grok following direct collaboration with an xAI team in late 2025.
Bloomberg reports this. Elon Musk’s xAI is sending engineers directly to the offices of potential business clients. The goal: to lure companies away from OpenAI and Anthropic. The strategy is paying off. Payment company Shift4 Payments is switching from ChatGPT to Grok after an xAI team began working with the company on a series of specific issues in late 2025. This was confirmed by Shift4 CEO Taylor Lauber.
The xAI team examined how the company could gain better insight into the health of its customer base and why users are leaving the platform. The result: a multi-million-dollar contract under which Shift4 deploys and uses Grok daily for customer sentiment analysis.
Grok Replaces ChatGPT at Shift4
Shift4 is deploying Grok for daily use and customer analysis, but is retaining Anthropic’s Claude for coding, according to Lauber. Interestingly, access to social data is what tips the scales. “What made xAI’s platform unique is the social signals that they can gather from X itself,” says Lauber, referring to Musk’s social network that provides data to Grok. “We are going live in 15 countries in the next three months and we couldn’t expand without the AI tools.”
xAI takes the same approach with other organizations. For example, the company previously helped automate Starlink’s customer service. At the same time, OpenAI and Anthropic are also taking steps to deploy engineers to potential clients and accelerate the adoption of their software. OpenAI is also collaborating with private equity firms to build a so-called “deployment arm.”
A turbulent start to the year
xAI’s business expansion comes after a difficult period. In early 2026, several co-founders left the company, and Grok caused a global uproar by generating non-consensual explicit images. Earlier, in January 2026, xAI launched Grok Business and Grok Enterprise, versions with more extensive security and privacy options for business users.
xAI is also expanding its revenue. According to Bloomberg, the company was on track for about $500 million in revenue in 2025, with an expected increase to $2 billion in 2026. For much of its three-year existence, xAI’s customers were primarily other Musk-owned companies and government agencies. With the Shift4 deal, xAI is taking a concrete step toward a broader business customer base.
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