Anthropic announced new features for its Claude AI assistant this week that let i t wo rk inside popular business programs and handle specialized tasks across different industries, the latest expansion that has kept investors on edge about the future of workplace software. The San Francisco company revealed the updates during an online even t on Tu esday, building on its January launch of Claude Cowork. The system no w co nnects directly with programs like Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, plus Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, DocuSign, and LegalZoom. Instead of switching between a chatbot and other applications, workers can now use Claude right inside the software they already have open. The assistant can pull information from spreadsheets to build presentations, similar to how a person would do the job. “We think of them almost as mini apps,” said Matt Piccolella, who handles products at Anthropic. He explaine d th e company wants to create dozens or hundreds of these add-on tools that companies can spread to their workers. The new features target specific departments. Human resources teams can get help writing job descriptions and offer letters. Private equity workers can model different scenarios. Design teams can put together creative briefs. Operations staff can summarize vendor proposals. Anthropic worked with financial firms, including FactSet, S&P, LSEG, and Apollo, to build plugins for financial services and private equity. Companies can also make their own custom plugins for tasks unique to their operations. The company is setting up a marketplace where businesses can host plugins for their employees to find and use. Who bears infrastructure costs? Companies like Microsoft spend billion s ma intaining secure servers. Salesforce employs thousands of workers to handle customer support and compliance. Claude sits on top of that infrastructure without having to store the data itself, run the compliance audits, or staff round-the-clock help desks. The AI assistant uses the foundation built by other companies while charging customers a premium to make their existing tools feel easier to use. Scott White, who leads enterprise products at Anthropic, said the company sees itself “as a platform, not a product, trying to own every workflow.” He stressed that Anthropic wants to work alongside existing business software rather than replace it, since these established programs handle sensitive company data and are built into how businesses operate. _*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> Stocks rallied on partnerships The announcement comes after Anthropic quietly rolled out some industry-specific plugins in early February, which sent software company stocks tumbling. A software industry exchange-traded fund dropped nearly 6% in one day, its worst performance since April. Thomson Reuters suffered its biggest one-day stock decline ever in early February, falling almost 16%. LegalZoom sank almost 20%. FactSet dropped more than 10%. European data company RELX fell 14%. Since Anthropic first announced Claude Cowork on January 30, ServiceNow stock has fallen more than 23%. Salesforce is down 22%, Snowflake has dropped 20%, Intuit has fallen 33%, and Thomson Reuters has declined 31%. In a twist, some of the same companies that saw their stocks crash in early February rallied on Tuesday as Anthropic announced they were actually partners in developing the new tools. FactSet shares climbed 3.8%, while Thomson Reuters jumped 8.8% during Tuesday trading. IBM shares tumbled Monday after Anthropic published information about how AI could help update COBOL, an old programming language for business data. IBM sells tools for working with COBOL code. Competition is heating up. OpenAI launched Frontier earlier this month, a platform that helps companies build and deploy AI agents that connect with their current software. OpenAI announce d Mo nda y i t fo rmed multiyear partnerships with four major consulting firms that will use Frontier with OpenAI engineers working at the firms. The company appears to be bettin g th ese consultants will introduce its business products to their many clients. Despite the pressure on software stocks , some experts remain skeptical that AI companies will actually wipe out traditional software makers. Analysts point out that free, open-source software has existed for decades, yet the market for commercial software has only grown during that time. They also question whether AI companies can truly compete with specialized business software built for specific jobs. Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst for eMarketer, previously told reporters that security worries will probably stop many companies from widely adopting AI tools. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .
