Anthropic and Hg Bring AI Consulting to Europe – Small Firms Are Yours
In short
- Anthropic and London investor Hg are setting up an independent AI consultancy for European companies, the Financial Times reports.
- Hubs in London and Berlin, launch planned by the end of 2026. Deal size not disclosed.
- The money angle: the big labs now sell implementation, not just models. Big clients get Anthropic’s engineers. Small businesses are still wide open for you.
Anthropic no longer just wants to sell you Claude. It wants to install it for you. According to the Financial Times, the company has agreed with Hg, one of Europe’s biggest software investors, to launch an independent AI consultancy on the continent. The AI consulting gold rush just reached Europe.
What happened
The FT broke the story on October 23, citing people familiar with the deal. The plan: a separate company that places AI consultants and engineers inside European businesses. They build new AI products or push existing projects over the finish line.
Where? London and Berlin. When? Launch is planned before the end of 2026. Who pays? Anthropic puts in money from its own balance sheet. Hg invests through funds it manages, including the London-listed HgCapital Trust. The size of the deal and the ownership split are not public, and neither company has officially announced it yet.
The focus: software companies that sell to businesses, plus other white-collar sectors. The new firm will also work across Hg’s own portfolio. Hg already has around 150 AI experts inside its companies, and that team stays.
This is a copy of a playbook. In July, Anthropic launched Ode in the US with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman, with $1.5 billion in planned investment. In May, OpenAI started its own deployment company with TPG, Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield.
How to use it
- If you sell AI implementation: stop competing for enterprise contracts. That door is closing. Your market is the 5-to-50-person company no Anthropic engineer will ever visit.
- Package, don’t consult. Fixed-price offers win: “AI inbox triage in 2 weeks”, “invoice processing automation for €X”. SMEs buy outcomes, not hours.
- Use the big names as proof. Anthropic betting on implementation sells the idea for you. You only prove you’re faster and cheaper.
- If you run an SME: don’t wait for a consultancy to knock. Pick one process that eats 10+ hours a week and automate it first.
Do the math: prices for the new firm are not public, so let’s price the work it replaces. Say one employee spends 15 hours a week on manual admin at €20 an hour. That’s €300 a week, about €1,300 a month, over €15,600 a year. A local freelancer automates most of it for an example €4,000 one-off plus €100 a month in tools. Payback in roughly three to four months. After that, it’s profit.
What it means
Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC just got a new competitor: the model maker itself. They have been reselling Claude to large clients. Now Anthropic can send its own engineers after the same budgets.
Why now? Anthropic is heading for an IPO and needs revenue beyond API calls. Hg needs proof that its software companies can become AI companies. Both win if adoption speeds up.
Who loses? Consultancies that only resell licenses. Who wins? Anyone who implements fast for companies too small for this club.
Ivan’s Take
This is the clearest signal yet: the money in AI is moving from models to implementation. Anthropic and Hg will take the big software companies. I would take everyone else. Small shops, local service firms and e-commerce stores need the same automations, and nobody from London or Berlin is coming for them.
Source: Financial Times
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