Microsoft seems to be gearing up its sales team to enhance competitiveness with other significant players in the AI sector.

During an internal meeting on Tuesday, company executives detailed a strategy for salespeople to draw unfavorable comparisons between AI offerings from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic with its own products, as reported by Bloomberg. This meeting, framed as a strategy briefing for the upcoming fiscal year, reportedly focused strongly on promoting the efficiency and cost advantages of Microsoft’s proprietary models over those of its competitors.

“While others sell components — we provide the complete end-to-end solution. That’s the narrative we must communicate effectively in FY27,” Executive Vice President Jay Parikh reportedly stated in the discussion.

Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou reportedly elaborated further, presenting a direct comparison between Copilot and Anthropic’s chatbot Claude. According to Bloomberg, Andreou highlighted that with respect to performance in Microsoft’s office applications, Anthropic’s model was “slower, less precise, and lacked adequate security integrations,” as reported by Bloomberg.

TechCrunch has reached out to both Microsoft and Anthropic for remarks and will update this article if we receive responses from either company.

It’s not particularly surprising for a company to coach its sales team on how to disparage competitors. What stands out more is the fact that Microsoft is now targeting its former partners — the same companies whose AI models have been integral to its own products.

This is just the latest development in this direction. A report earlier this month indicated that Microsoft has been replacing OpenAI and Anthropic’s models in flagship applications like Word and Excel with its own — a cost-reduction strategy, according to that report.

There was a period when Microsoft and OpenAI were closely intertwined. Years ago, the two firms entered a distinctive agreement wherein Microsoft supplied funding and computing resources to OpenAI while securing exclusive access to OpenAI’s API and models. The partnership was revised in April, removing the exclusivity clause and enabling OpenAI to sell to Microsoft’s rivals.

This altered relationship may shed light on the sales team’s fresh approach. Microsoft has experienced a challenging stock outlook over the past year, as investors express concerns about the company’s extensive spending on its AI expansion. Promoting the competitiveness of those products is likely an effort to stabilize investor sentiments and bolster confidence in Microsoft’s long-term AI strategy.