The lightning pace of AI advancement is slowed only by the challenge of enterprise adoption, some tech leaders believe. 

Even the most visionary CEOs face hurdles in educating thousands of employees on rapidly evolving AI capabilities, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said during the AI provider’s May 5 webinar on financial services. 

“Our ability to commercialize this technology, to gain revenue for this technology, is held back not by the power of the models and the economic value [that it] can generate in principles, but that sort of diffusion through the world,” he said. 

By the time one wave of education is complete, the next generation of models has arrived, enabling new use cases and addressing previous limitations. This forces businesses to constantly implement new tech as the next iteration is released, Amodei said.  

While AI tech is growing faster than any previous technology, Amodei said adoption “is still much slower than what the technology itself is capable of” handling. 

Growing go-to-market teams 

Anthropic’s own go-to-market team of nearly 1,000 pales in comparison to the sales teams of similarly sized companies, which he estimates at 50,000. The total Anthropic headcount is slightly over 4,000, Amodei said. 

OpenAi for one, is on track to nearly double its headcount to 8,000 this year, compared to 4,500 in 2025, according to a Reuters March 21 report. 

The go-to-market team for financial services at Anthropic boasts the highest headcount among all other verticals, Nicholas Lin, head of product for financial services at Anthropic, previously told FinAi News. adding that implementing AI at financial services organizations takes significant time and effort because they are highly regulated.  

Financial services is the second-highest revenue driver at Anthropic, behind only technology company revenue, according to Anthropic. Additionally, 20 of the company’s top 50 commercial clients operate in financial services. 

Amodei emphasized the need for an ecosystemic approach, saying the use of a variety of partners to distribute AI tools is preferable to relying solely on Anthropic’s own tools to embed them into company workflows. 

The implementation bottleneck 

Financial services executives echo this point, saying the most friction exists in the implementation of AI into existing platforms and processes. 

“I think the technology is incredibly powerful,” Lori Beer, chief information officer at JPMorgan, said during the webinar. Integrating the tech for JPMorgan’s staff — and training them without disrupting service — has been difficult, she said.  

“The first thing is, we are a business of trust,” Beer said. “You have to be moving fast on the innovation front, but you have to do it in a safe, secure and responsible way.” 

JPMorgan doesn’t “spend a lot of time debating” the ROI of AI,” Beer said, adding that “these are the foundational things you must do.” 

Return on investment will be discussed only when AI has been embedded into nearly all the bank’s workflows, she said. And at that point, the measurement of success could shift. 

“We have to change — in many cases — the metrics, in terms of how we measure value and success in the future,” she said. 

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