The Morning Download: Bristol-Myers Squibb Brings Anthropic’s Claude to 30,000 Employees

Good morning. The hits keep coming. Biopharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb is bringing Anthropic’s flagship Claude to its more than 30,000 employees—deepening its use of artificial intelligence and AI agents across multiple business functions.

Separately, KPMG this week announced its own deal with Anthropic to integrate Claude AI tools into its global tax and consulting services.

Together, these deals show Anthropic (and OpenAI's) continued pursuit of business users through big partnerships with leaders in key industry sectors, such as life sciences and financial services.

It is not the only race in town. Sector leaders meanwhile are scrambling to bake AI into operations, betting that AI-native workflows will define the competitive edge going forward.

As Bristol-Myers and KPMG told the WSJ Leadership Institute, these deals are not so much about tapping into a new AI tool, but embedding it as infrastructure for new workflows.

“A lot of it is us avoiding having to build basic infrastructure tooling, so that we can really focus on the use cases that are going to bring more medicines to patients faster,” Greg Meyers, Bristol-Myers’s chief digital and technology officer, tells the WSJLI's Belle Lin.

“This is not a chatbot layered on top of an existing tool,” Rema Serafi, KPMG’s U.S. vice chair of tax, told the WSJLI's Mark Maurer earlier. “Our people and our clients are going to be working very differently because the way they work is going to be accelerated in terms of the sophistication and the use and the ways that they innovate.”

We're officially past the "chatbot" era. AI is starting to become the backbone for much of the work now happening at these firms. For enterprises, that means they're locked in; for the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, it could mean stickier contracts.

“It’s not just about using AI to design new drugs, or not just about using AI to make clinical trials go faster, but really using AI end-to-end through every part of the process of operating a life sciences organization,” said Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences.

AI keeps it cool as hockey (and the weather) heats up. Things were heating up in New York last night – especially at the National Hockey League headquarters where execs gathered to celebrate a new partnership with building automation and energy management provider Honeywell.

Hockey in America is having a moment. (As to whether that’s entirely attributable to hit shows Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, we’ll let you decide). But since the league is experiencing a year of record growth, execs say it’s an important time to make sure arenas are up to snuff.

The problem? Managing arenas is not as easy as it looks. As New York’s tech scene mingled with its sports crowd over cocktails behind a wall of pucks, Honeywell’s Greg Turner was explaining to me what an “ice plant” is and why it’s so tough to manage.

It turns out, creating ice, melting ice, and getting rid of the fog that naturally appears around it is an incredibly energy intensive process. Honeywell’s new AI software is designed to help run machines more energy efficiently, said Turner, chief solutions officer for Honeywell Building Automation.

So while the city sweltered under 90 degree temps, Honeywell execs were pledging to keep the NHL ice very, very cold. If only they could do the same for our janky New York window AC units. (We hear it’s going to be a hot summer.)

— Isabelle Bousquette

• Google at its annual developer conference debuted Gemini Spark, a personal agent it says is capable of navigating a user’s digital life, and Gemini Omni, a tool to create videos from various inputs including text, audio and images. The company also introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash, a model it says is well suited for coding and agentic work and runs four times faster than other frontier models.
• Also... Gemini 3.5 Flash will power a bigger, more interactive Google Search box, the New York Times reports. 
• Alibaba unveiled a new AI chip, the Zhenwu M890, that is three times more powerful than its predecessor and released an update to its Qwen AI model, as the Chinese tech giant pushes to reduce dependence on Nvidia amid U.S. export restrictions.
• In one of the biggest surveys on employers’ graduate hiring plans this year, nearly three times as many executives at companies using or exploring AI said they were increasing junior-level hiring in 2026 than cutting back. Those using AI most extensively were the most bullish, according to Strada Education Foundation, which surveyed about 1,500 employers.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.