[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Elon Musk-led AI company xAI has moved to secure corporate customers by directly dispatching engineers to potential clients' offices.

For a long period after its founding, xAI's main customers were Musk affiliates and government agencies. It has now moved in earnest to expand its general corporate customer base, using its contract with Shift4 as a foothold. Its goal is to draw in customers of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Bloomberg reported on March 20 that the strategy appears to be translating into results.

Payments company Shift4 Payments is switching from ChatGPT to Grok. This was the result of direct collaboration between the xAI team and Shift4 by the end of 2025, and Shift4 Chief Executive Taylor Lauber confirmed it.

The xAI team closely reviewed how to assess the status of Shift4's customer base and analyze reasons for churn. As a result, a contract worth several million dollars was signed. Shift4 uses Grok daily for customer sentiment analysis. Lauber said it will continue to use Anthropic's Claude for coding.

The decisive reason Shift4 chose Grok was access to social data. Lauber said, "The differentiator unique to the xAI platform is social signals collected from X (Twitter)," adding, "We are launching services in 15 countries within 3 months, and expansion is impossible without AI tools."

xAI is applying the same approach to other companies. It also supported work to automate Starlink customer service. Since the start of this year, several co-founders have left the company, and Grok has also sparked controversy worldwide for generating non-consensual explicit images.

According to Bloomberg, xAI revenue is expected to rise from about $5 in 2025 to $2 billion in 2026.

OpenAI and Anthropic are also responding by dispatching engineers to potential clients. OpenAI is also working with private equity firms to build a separate distribution organization.