(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
Everywhere I go it’s Claude, Claude, Claude. Since Anthropic released Claude Cowork earlier this year, the AI platform has taken off, with both revenue and valuation projections for the company skyrocketing. In the field, I’m starting to see a growing number of my small business clients connecting Claude to their data and using it to help analyze and provide insights into their operations.
Anthropic is taking advantage of this opportunity.
Claude for Small Business
Its Head of U.S. Small Businesses, Lina Ochman, is leading a tour of American cities to help train small businesses on using AI tools. And, no surprise, to also promote the company’s recently launched Claude for Small Business offering, which is Claude bundled with out-of-the-box integrations to many popular small business applications like QuickBooks, HubSpot, PayPal and Docusign.
Many of these connectors already existed, but Claude for Small Business packages them together and, more importantly, includes a set of 15 pre-written skills for doing things like chasing invoices, triaging leads, writing up follow-up emails, preparing tax/accounting packages, checking payroll readiness and creating marketing campaigns in order to help its customers actually start using AI with the information they’ve accumulated in those systems.
“Claude for Small Business is an AI workflow assistant for SMBs,” she said. “It’s designed to connect their tools, understand their business content and help run their back office, customer, finance and marketing tasks with human approval built-in.”
Small Business Needs More From AI
Why the big small business push? The obvious answer: 34 million potential Claude customers, all hungry for AI, most still figuring out how to use it.
According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, more than three-quarters of small businesses (76%) report currently using AI, with the majority stating that results have been overwhelmingly positive. However, only 14% have fully integrated AI into core operations.
“Most software has been built for enterprises, for VC backed startups, for consumers, but not for the 15 person HVAC company or the 50% real estate brokerage, or the manufacturer with all of these back-office operations,” Ochman said. “They don’t have time. They don’t have access to the resources or the capital to take training courses or hire implementation consultants. Our goal is to give business owners templates without requiring consultants or extensive training.”
AI As An Employee
Anthropic’s small business AI training tour is designed as a starting point to help owners get going with AI. To do this, the content begins with fluency. Anthropic also offers additional courses through its Anthropic Academy. Ochman stresses that the lessons are “model agnostic” and designed to teach general AI concepts, not just Claude.
Time is also spent on writing effective prompts — or queries — so that Claude and other AI chatbots can deliver the best response, or perform the most effective action. Most of us have learned just how a good prompt can generate the most useful answers. But we often struggle with the approach. Ochman says the best approach is to consider assume your chatbot is a new employee.
“Treat AI as a new employee and treat it as a really great skilled worker that doesn’t know anything about your business,” she said. “The most effective way to prompt is to provide context by explaining your business, the tools being used, the challenges in the task and the desired outcome. AI may be skilled, but it does not automatically understand your company.”
Skills And Workflows
If you’re just using AI as glorified internet search engine, you’re barely scratching the surface. Claude for Small Business — and some of its competitors — are making it easier to also search on your own company’s data with out-of-the-box connectors or by leveraging tools like MCP (model-context protocol) which can be setup by most people with a technical background (or interest).
But for me there’s using AI and really using AI. Most of my clients are using their AI tool today as a hyped-up, natural language reporting too for extracting data from their systems and online. That’s great. But the real power in these systems is to have it do actual work. And to do that you need to lean into skills and workflows. For her, it’s what sets Claude for Small Business apart.
“We’re not only connecting a business owner to their data, we’re using that data,” she said.
Ochman cites marketing as an example. Using Claude, a business owner can better predict business slowdowns and create marketing campaigns to take up the slack and then push these campaigns out either through emails or into a customer relationship management system like HubSpot.
Privacy Concerns
What about the privacy of a company’s data? According to Ochman it’s the number one hesitation she hears. Business owners are concerned about how AI platforms like Claude uses their customers’ data to train their models, whether or not their data is still their data and if it’s safe and secure. Anthropic’s response hasn’t changed. Her answer?
“No, we don’t train on business content and what you put in does not become part of the next model. And you own what goes in and what comes out. We don’t own the data. It’s your data.”
The Impact On Employees
What about their staff? Ochman stresses that tools like Claude aren’t going to replace people anytime soon, if at all, particularly for small businesses. Even companies creating workflows to perform tasks are using Claude’s skills to ensure that the chatbot is asking for approval before performing any major steps, especially involving financial or customer data and not to do anything without approval. Ochman stresses that this is a tool that keeps workers in the loop, while at the same time allowing them to be more productive. She’s confident that the business owners who lean into AI tools like Claude for Small Business will soon will feel like they’re much more caught up.
“Small businesses usually have too much work and too few people and have too many things on their plates and on their to-do lists,” Ochman says. “They’re not looking to reduce head count or gain efficiency. They’re looking to actually just get back time to grow their business, to do more creative pursuits…or just spend more time with their family.”
