Microsoft is getting more competition: New Office tools from Anthropic
Microsoft is now facing new competition in one of its safest business areas: The AI developer Anthropic is expanding its AI assistant Claude to include a series of interactive office applications.
Tables and whiteboards
With Claude Meetings, Claude Sheets and Claude Whiteboards, the company now wants to increasingly reach users who are not programmers but who regularly organize meetings, evaluate data or develop ideas. The new functions are intended to simplify the use of artificial intelligence in everyday work and establish Claude more strongly as a central work platform, the company said. The three applications were presented on Tuesday (local time) in San Francisco and are initially available as beta.
Claude Sheets and Claude Whiteboards are available to customers of all paid subscriptions, while Claude Meetings is reserved for Teams and Enterprise customers. In addition, Anthropic has released Claude Data, previously tested in a beta phase under the name Claude Dashboards, to all paying users.
Claude Meetings is essentially an AI agent that can attend meetings and log their contents. Claude Whiteboards is used to collect and structure ideas on a shared digital workspace. With Claude Sheets, users can edit tables and analyze data together with the AI. In addition, the AI chatbot Claude should be able to convert presentations into short explanatory videos.
Open up new user groups
Anthropic thus complements its existing offering, which already includes Claude Docs, Slides, Design and Motion. The new functions are among the so-called artifacts with which the company provides interactive graphical user interfaces within its AI assistant. Anthropic introduced the concept around two and a half years ago. Product manager Nicholas Lin explained that Claude Code changed the way developers work about a year ago. Now Anthropic wants to enable similar progress for other professional groups. To date, there are still significant hurdles to the introduction of AI among employees without technical specialization, which the provision of such tools should eliminate.
Anthropic also wants to deepen the integration of external applications. New interactive connections make it possible to use services from Adobe, HubSpot and Atlassian directly within Claude. For example, users can open an Adobe PDF editor or manage marketing campaigns in HubSpot without having to switch between different browser tabs. Anthropic had already created a basis for such connections with the Model Context Protocol. The associated marketplace now includes more than 9,000 extensions.
Research Snipers is currently covering all technology news including Google, Apple, Android, Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung News, and More. Research Snipers has decade of experience in breaking technology news, covering latest trends in tech news, and recent developments. Can be reached at author1@researchsnipers.com
