Anthropic aims to tame workplace AI
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Anthropic is releasing new tools to help business customers bring order to the wild west of workplace AI.
Why it matters: Chatbots can't achieve meaningful productivity gains and return on investment for businesses until they're tailored to how users actually work.
- While the consumer race is currently dominated by ChatGPT and Gemini, Anthropic's models continue to outpace both OpenAI and Google's models in the enterprise.
Driving the news: Anthropic updated the "skills" feature in its Claude chatbot Thursday to help companies use AI to reduce the busywork of repeatable tasks.
- Skills are reusable instruction sets that teach Claude specific workflows, standards, and domain knowledge. Think: brand style guidelines, email templates and task creation in tools like Jira and Asana.
- Anthropic says the latest updates make skills easier to use, build and discover.
- Skills now includes integration with popular workplace tools, including Notion, Canva, Figma and Atlassian.
Between the lines: Anthropic also announced that Agent Skills is now an open standard making skills portable across different tools and platforms, which means skills people create in Claude can be used in models like ChatGPT or platforms like Cursor, that adopt the standard.
- Enterprise admins will be able to manage skills and employees will be able to access them in one central location.
- Anthropic says workers can create new skills with prompts: "just describe what you want, and Claude builds it," the company says.
The big picture: The rush to deploy AI across workplaces has largely been messy and fraught.
- Some employees are pretending that they don't use AI at work, while others are pretending that they do.
Yes, but: Slow workplace AI adoption may be just as much about scattered tools as it is about workers' fears of automating themselves out of a job.
- Workplace skills honed over years in a career are what give increasingly anxious employees a sense of job security.
- Anthropic's offer to automate those skills may not be welcome to some — or, conversely, may be a boon to those already enjoying increased productivity.
The bottom line: For this grand AI experiment to work, there must be some consistency. Anthropic hopes its upgraded enterprise tools will help.
