Anthropic launches AI office suite

On Tuesday local time, investors in US tech giant Microsoft once again faced the volatility brought by "AI developers snatching jobs in the office software sector".

Specifically, Anthropic that is pushing for a US stock IPO announced the expansion of Claude's office functions, launching the spreadsheet Claude Sheets, the digital whiteboard Claude Whiteboards, and upgrading the data analysis tool Claude Data as well as interactive connectors. Together with the existing document, presentation and design features, Claude's office product ecosystem has taken further shape.

(Source: X)

After hearing the news of "Claude is coming", Microsoft, the developer of the Office suite, once plunged by more than 3% in intraday trading, then the decline narrowed to some extent, and finally closed down 2.2%.

Collaborate on spreadsheets right inside Claude

In this update, the feature that most easily reminds regular office users of Microsoft's competing product is Claude Sheets.

According to the announcement, users can build spreadsheets, organize data, create and edit formulas together with colleagues and Claude, and collaborate across multiple worksheets. This means Claude is evolving from an AI assistant that only helps generate spreadsheet content into a full-fledged workspace that hosts all spreadsheet-related work.

However, it is still too early to regard it as a substitute for Microsoft Excel at the current stage.

Nicholas Lin, Head of Product at Anthropic, told the media that the current experience of Claude Sheets is still "quite basic", and it is not targeted at more complex tasks such as financial modeling. In these scenarios, using the plug-in provided by Anthropic for existing spreadsheet software will be more effective.

Nicholas Lin said: "I think those products from Microsoft and Google have their own applicable scenarios, especially for more complex enterprise-level application scenarios. But we hope to also demonstrate a brand new way of working in Claude."

Claude Whiteboards launched alongside the spreadsheet is targeted at team discussions and project planning. Teams can place and organize ideas on the shared digital whiteboard, and then let Claude summarize the discussion results.

The predecessor of Claude Data is Claude Dashboards, which focuses on connecting enterprise data. According to the official introduction, it can connect to tools such as Snowflake, Salesforce, generate data dashboards, visual analysis content or short videos with voiceover, and support the use of indicator definitions certified by the enterprise data team.

Anthropic also previewed the meeting assistant Claude Meetings. In the future, users can add Claude to calls, let it record meeting content, and update the documents the team is working on during the discussion.

In addition to adding spreadsheets and whiteboards, Anthropic also wants to "move" other office software that employees use every day into Claude.

According to the announcement, the upgraded interactive connectors allow partners to embed applications directly into Claude. Users can use tools from vendors such as Adobe while talking to the AI, without having to switch back and forth between multiple web pages.

Some plug-ins also come with preset skills for specific work scenarios. For example, sales personnel can prepare for customer meetings with the help of the Salesforce plug-in, finance staff can analyze financial data through the NetSuite plug-in, and the human resources team can use the Workday plug-in to handle leave and expense-related matters.

Anthropic said its app marketplace now has more than 9,000 connectors and plug-ins.

Turn professional expertise into office software with the help of AI

Anthropic said in the announcement that Claude's applications are expanding from programmers to non-technical teams such as legal, finance and product management. These employees may not know how to write code, but they are familiar with their own business, and can use AI to turn their professional experience into tools that the team can reuse repeatedly.

Take Anthropic itself as an example: its legal team used Claude to build a legal review tool for use in Slack, which can automatically mark content that needs to be modified according to the team's existing review rules. The company said this has shortened the review time for marketing materials from three days to 24 hours, and some simple issues can be modified before the formal review. The finance team has transformed a long business update document for management into an interactive page, allowing the whole team to maintain it together with Claude.

Cases disclosed by customers also focus on reducing repetitive preparatory work.

Ash Gupta, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Advantage Solutions, a sales and marketing service provider, said that the team previously spent about 10 hours on each round of forecasting to produce presentation materials, write descriptions and verify content. After Claude automated these sorting tasks, the time consumption was reduced to less than 30 minutes, allowing finance staff to spend more time analyzing business and supporting decision-making.

Claude is also used to connect scattered information in sales and product development processes.

Customer relationship management software vendor HubSpot said that account managers can view real-time dashboards that pull data from HubSpot in Claude, learn the information they need to know before the meeting, determine which customers to contact next, and generate a draft follow-up email within 30 minutes after the call ends. Cloud application monitoring and security software vendor Datadog said that product managers are using Claude to turn ideas into function briefs, product requirement documents and testable prototypes faster.

In fact, OpenAI was the first to take action

In fact, Anthropic is not the only AI company that is seizing the office software market.

OpenAI launched the collaborative workspace ChatGPT Space at the end of September, and began to roll out ChatGPT Slides to eligible Pro, Business and Enterprise users on October 16, cutting into the presentation software market represented by PowerPoint.

Users can submit conversations, files or outlines to ChatGPT to generate presentations, then modify and add comments in real time with colleagues, and also ask the AI to adjust content and layout; after completion, they can present directly in ChatGPT, or export to formats such as PowerPoint and PDF through the web version.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily", Author: Shi Zhengcheng, published by 36Kr with authorization.