Man is attracting a new type of customer: small business owners

Anthropic is looking to take small companies to court. To that end, the company on Wednesday announced the launch of Claude for Small Business, a new suite of services designed for customers who look less like Walmart and Starbucks and more like your local hardware store or coffee shop.

To date, most AI adoption has been done at the enterprise level. In the recent past, studies have shown that most companies that have scaled AI systems beyond experimental or experimental integration tend to be large companies with expanded budgets. This appears to be changing somewhat, with small and medium-sized businesses seeing greater adoption.

Anthropic’s new feature set is designed to serve these new converts to AI. It is available via a newly introduced toggle within Claude Cowork, the company’s task automation platform for business users who can browse the web, manage files, and execute multi-step workflows on the user’s behalf. By running it, paying users gain access to a range of automated services, including bookkeeping functions, business insights, and generative tools for advertising campaigns.

The new suite also includes integrations between Claude Cowork and a number of software products – such as QuickBooks, Canva, Docusign, HubSpot and PayPal.

“Small businesses represent 44% of US GDP and employ nearly half of the private sector workforce, but their adoption of AI has lagged behind larger companies,” the company said. “Tools and training are rarely tailored to the ways small businesses operate, and as a result, their use often stops at the chat window.”

For founders and investors, this move signals that the AI ​​platform wars are expanding in the market and that the next major battleground for user acquisition is not the Fortune 500; It’s the 36 million small businesses that make up the backbone of the American economy.

Anthropic lags slightly behind rival OpenAI, which launched Enterprise ChatGPT at the end of 2023, including integration with smaller teams called ChatGPT Business.

Anthropic plans to aggressively promote its new features with a coast-to-coast promotional tour, starting in Chicago and hitting 10 cities total. At each stop, the company plans to offer a free AI training workshop that will be available to 100 local small business leaders.