Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI is sending engineers directly to potential customers' offices in an attempt to win commercial customers from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. This "personal service" approach has helped xAI win orders from payment service provider Shift4 Payments Inc.

Shift4 CEO Taylor Lauber said that after field testing, the company plans to phase out OpenAI’s ChatGPT in favor of xAI’s Grok.

But Lauber added that the company will continue to use Anthropic's Claude for code work.

It is worth mentioning that Jared Isaacman, the founder of Shift4, is Musk’s friend and the current director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

xAI’s service strategy reflects broader changes in the entire AI industry: leading developers are scrambling to persuade more enterprise customers to pay for their products.

AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are actively recruiting and dispatching engineers to work with potential customers to lower the barriers to software adoption. OpenAI is also working with private equity firms to create a dedicated "deployment arm."

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

Taylor Lauber said that xAI is currently negotiating with companies, including Shift4, that need customer service solutions. Previously, xAI has also helped SpaceX’s Starlink realize customer service automation.

Lauber said that the xAI team began working with Shift4 in late 2025 and listed a series of problems to be solved, including assessing the "health" of customers and analyzing why users are losing.

The multi-million dollar contract will see Shift4 use Grok in its day-to-day operations, as well as to collect customer sentiment data.

"The unique thing about the xAI platform is its ability to capture social signals from the

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