This week Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman officially launched Ode, an AI services company that combines Anthropic’s frontier AI models with a team of engineers and operators, backed by a consortium of heavyweight investors that includes Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, Leonard Green & Partners, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital.

The launch is built on the foundation of Fractional AI, the applied AI services firm acquired in May 2026. Fractional AI’s team, alongside engineers from Anthropic, forms the operational core of the new business. Ode is led by Fractional AI co-founders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who assume the roles of chief executive officer and chief technology officer respectively.

Announcing the launch, Taylor said that while organisations increasingly recognise AI’s potential, many continue to struggle to translate that potential into operational outcomes. “Our teams partner closely with CEOs and across organisations to define and execute the highest priority AI initiatives,” he said. “By pairing the deep subject matter expertise of our clients with our top applied AI talent, we’re able to drive transformation-level impact.”

Some may read this as Anthropic becoming frustrated that they are not seeing faster progress in organisations leveraging their technology for organisational change.

For law firms, the launch is notable because it reflects the fact, as noted by legal AI founder Tim Pullan in welcoming the launch of Ode, that the next wave of AI is not just in the models, it’s in vertical solutions that reshape workflows and offerings for specific industries. Pullan founded law firm product studio Purple in July 2025, with the aim of helping law firms to ‘turn ideas into outcome-priced platforms that clients value.’

We have already seen a marked increase in law firm build projects, not least Kirkland & Ellis’s $500m AI build with Palantir. Shoosmiths in June launched its own contract review platform Apollo, which it would be surprising if it didn’t productise.

In a post on LinkedIn this week, Pullan said that in founding Purple, “We bet that the most ambitious law firms wouldn’t stop at ‘AI-enabled drafting’, workflow fixes or internal copilots. They would use the speed, power and flexibility of AI to do something bigger; turn hard-won service expertise into products, shift from manual advisory to productised offerings, and build client experiences that simply weren’t possible in the pre-AI age. Importantly, these products will become significant engines of scale and profit (not ‘cheap law’).

Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Pullan observed: “If law firms are investing in building their own version of a tool that is widely available in the market the business case is harder than if they build to redefine their offering with a tool that is client facing.”

Legal tech software developer Xperate, set up by former Tikit heads Simon Hill and Mark Garnish five years ago to help law firms with their own builds, echo that this is the direction of travel. Hill told Legal IT Insider: “Xperate is working with both legal vendors and law firms on phase two of the AI revolution; we’re moving into very specific workflows to solve legal workflow issues. We’ve been invited by a top 20 global law firm onto their AI strategy group because they have trialled mainstream legal AI tools and now want to apply AI to specific workflows within teams to solve issues they have at a practical level. That is where things are moving to.”

Whether Ode becomes directly relevant to legal probably depends on how big your law firm is and what your budget is. There is also a query over the extent to which generalist engineers and operators can really understand and work with law firms to squeeze the most out of their specialist knowledge.

That aside, we can expect to see further growth in services-led AI adoption, as organisations increasingly look for specialist expertise to translate advances in foundation models into measurable business outcomes.