Buy The Plumbing, Not The Model

On Monday, HCLTech, India's third-largest IT services firm, announced a business unit dedicated entirely to Anthropic, adding to its Gemini business unit and its OpenAI partnership. Stephen thinks organizing around the AI lab is the wrong way to slice it: the model will matter less and less, and the plumbing around it will matter more. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: - **What HCLTech announced.** A Global Premier Partnership with Anthropic, a dedicated Anthropic Business Unit, forward-deployed engineers, and Claude inside its AI Force platform. Accenture formed an Anthropic business group last December. - **Fair to HCLTech.** Customers ask for lab-specific help, the labs fund it, the release talks about guardrails and human oversight, and HCLTech's advanced AI revenue rose 78 percent on a year ago. - **The model is not the moat.** A different lab leads every few months. Building your company around one lab's model is building your house around this year's refrigerator. - **Agnostic plumbing in practice.** Keep the credentials your agents need in an external secrets store such as Infisical or 1Password, then bring your Python files and local programs. Stephen's company moved from Claude to Grok Bot this way in about twenty minutes. - **The Microsoft exception.** For Microsoft shops, deep platform expertise makes sense, because AI that runs inside your own tenant matters most in regulated industries such as health care under HIPAA and financial services. - **Price, briefly.** HCLTech's CEO says IT services are in the early phases of deflation. Agnostic plumbing lets you shop for it every quarter. - **The test.** Ask how long it would take to switch your AI to a different lab next Monday. A day means plumbing. A project plan means a landlord. **Sources:** - HCLTech and Anthropic, PR Newswire, 12 October 2026: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hcltech-and-anthropic-sign-global-premier-partnership-to-scale-governed-agentic-ai-across-global-enterprises-302905626.html - CNA (Reuters), 12 October 2026: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/indias-hcltech-signs-pact-anthropic-set-up-business-unit-6452836 - HCLTech Q2 FY27 results, PR Newswire, 12 October 2026: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hcltech-delivers-strong-q2-led-by-record-deal-bookings-of-3-3-billion-302906028.html - DQ India, 12 October 2026: https://www.dqindia.com/news/hcltechs-ai-revenue-jumps-78-but-ai-led-deflation-is-just-starting-12670107 - HCLTech Gemini Enterprise Business Unit, 22 April 2026: https://www.hcltech.com/press-releases/hcltech-launches-gemini-enterprise-business-unit-accelerate-agentic-ai-adoption - HCLTech named OpenAI Advanced Partner, 6 August 2026: https://www.hcltech.com/press-releases/hcltech-named-openai-advanced-partner *The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.*