Anthropic takes on Google Workplace and Microsoft Office

Anthropic is opening up a new front in its competition with companies such as Microsoft and Google. It is doing so by launching a number of Claude features that are now typical of office suites, such as those found in Google Workspace or the various versions of Office. The announcement concerns the release of a series of new services: Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheet and Claude Data.

Whiteboards is designed to bring structure to brainstorming sessions, particularly when more than one person is involved. No more texts with added notes and comments, but a timeline with assigned tasks built from the notes taken by each person involved in a project. Sheets, on the other hand, is designed for creating spreadsheets, complete with tables, formatting and, above all, formulas. At present, Anthropic itself acknowledges that Excel is superior to its own product, whilst pointing out that it is already possible to integrate Claude into Microsoft’s software.

Finally, Claude Data is the evolution of Claude Dashboards, a service released in beta as recently as last October. This service allows you to query business data stored on platforms such as Amazon Redshift, BigQuery and ClickHouse. You can use this feature of the Anthropic model to define and standardise the queries used to access the database, generate narratives – including videos – that bring the data to life, and keep track of changes made over time.

These features are available on the web, as well as on desktop and mobile apps. The only thing to bear in mind is that Claude Data requires a connector, for example to a CRM. These features are enabled by default on both Team and Enterprise plans, except for Data, which will be enabled on Enterprise subscriptions from 19 November.