According to the latest announcement, Anthropic has launched Claude for Small Business, an integrated toolkit on the Claude Cowork platform to support businesses in automating multiple daily tasks.
This is seen as a step showing that the AI competition is spreading from large corporate customer groups to more popular markets.
In recent years, most of the most powerful AI applications have mainly appeared at the large enterprise level. Recent studies show that companies with the ability to deploy AI beyond the testing phase often have abundant technology budgets and specialized technical teams.
However, this trend is gradually changing as small and medium-sized enterprises begin to look for simpler, lower-cost, and easier-to-use AI solutions.
Anthropic said the new service package is designed for people who first approach AI. Users can activate it through the new switch button in Claude Cowork, the company's work automation platform.
After enabling this feature, paid customers can use many tools such as accounting, business analysis, creating advertising campaigns, file management and multi-step processing.
The toolkit also supports connection with many familiar software for small businesses such as QuickBooks, Canva, DocuSign, HubSpot and PayPal.
This helps businesses integrate AI into existing processes without having to change the entire operating system.
Anthropic emphasizes that small businesses currently contribute about 44% of the US GDP and use nearly half of the private sector labor force.
However, the application speed of AI in this group is still much lower than in large corporations. According to the company, most AI tools today are not really designed to suit the operating needs of small businesses, causing their use to often only stop at basic conversation.
Investors assess that the new move shows that the AI battle is entering a stage of competition for public users. Instead of only targeting companies in the Fortune 500 list, technology companies now want to approach about 36 million small businesses that are creating the foundation of the US economy.
However, Anthropic is still considered slower than its opponent OpenAI, the unit that launched Enterprise ChatGPT from the end of 2023 and then expanded with the ChatGPT Business version for small groups.
To promote the new wave of AI access, Anthropic plans to implement a series of cross-US training programs, starting in Chicago and going through 10 cities.
At each stop, the company will organize free AI training courses for about 100 local small business leaders to encourage the application of technology in business operations.
