xAI engineers move into customer offices, forcibly stealing orders from ChatGPT

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI is directly sending engineers to potential clients’ offices in an effort to win business from competitors OpenAI and Anthropic.

This “hands-on” approach has helped xAI secure an order from payment service provider Shift4 Payments Inc.

Shift4 CEO Taylor Lauber said that after on-site testing, the company plans to gradually phase out OpenAI’s ChatGPT and switch to xAI’s Grok.

However, Lauber added that the company will continue to use Anthropic’s Claude for coding work.

Notably, Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift4 and a friend of Musk, is also the current director of NASA.

This service strategy by xAI reflects a broader shift across the AI industry: leading developers are competing to persuade more enterprise clients to pay for their products.

AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic are actively recruiting and deploying engineers to collaborate with potential clients to lower the barriers to software adoption. OpenAI is also working with private equity firms to create a dedicated “deployment department.”

For most of its three-year history, xAI’s clients have mainly come from Musk’s other companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, as well as some government agencies.

Taylor Lauber said that xAI is currently in talks with companies like Shift4 that need customer service solutions. Previously, xAI also helped SpaceX’s Starlink automate customer service.

Lauber stated that xAI began collaborating with Shift4 at the end of 2025, addressing a series of issues including assessing customer “health” and analyzing why users churn.

This multi-million dollar contract allows Shift4 to adopt Grok in daily operations and use it to collect customer sentiment data.

“The uniqueness of the xAI platform is that it can gather social signals directly from the X platform itself. We will launch in 15 countries over the next three months, and without these AI tools, we simply couldn’t expand.”