AI + ML
But Pro or Max biz users should know that the company may train its AI on your data
Anthropic is pushing into the small business space with a set of new plug-and-play tools designed for those without a tech team budget, but be warned: Depending on your Anthropic subscription tier, some business data might get sucked up to train Claude.
Anthropic announced Claude for Small Business (CSB) on Wednesday, describing the new plugin as a way for SMB owners without AI expertise to automate the basic business tasks they’re saddled with, like payroll, chasing payments, and launching campaigns, that are usually the purview of different departments at the enterprise level.
Installation is designed to be dead simple, with Pro, Max, and Teams plan users able to add it as a plugin from the Cowork space in the Claude Desktop app. Skills can then be run using natural language prompts or slash commands outlined here.
Users will find “a package of connectors and ready-to-run workflows” inside the CSB plugin, according to the announcement. The aforementioned capabilities of the plugin are part of 15 skills based on common repeatable business tasks, while 15 agentic workflows are also included across areas like finance, operations, marketing and the like.
As for the connectors themselves, Anthropic specifically mentions seven of them included in Claude for Small Business: Intuit Quickbooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. An Anthropic spokesperson told The Register in an email that CSB isn’t limited to those connectors, but the skills and workflows rolling out for the plugin were only optimized for those connectors to start. Anthropic told us it chose those products based on the results of a survey of SMB owners, but it plans to add support for more connectors in the coming months.
In other words, if you’re a small business owner and you rely on a platform not on that list, you’ll have to keep waiting a while longer if you want to pull that info into Claude.
Gotta reach ‘em all
It’s logical that Anthropic is pushing into the SMB space. The company has seen a leap in business customer subscriptions this year, taking advantage of OpenAI’s slip in the professional user space, and with growth comes the search for new markets to tap.
As Anthropic notes in the announcement, and as many analysts have pointed out, AI adoption among SMBs has historically lagged enterprises. That’s to be expected, of course: Enterprises have far more resources to invest in new, unproven technologies and the money to absorb failure when said new tech doesn’t pan out as expected.
Anthropic said in its CSB announcement that it specifically designed the new plugin for “those who have historically been last in line for new technology,” or small businesses, in other words. The company also launched an AI fluency for small business course to help SMB owners understand what exactly they’re installing when they tell Claude to install CSB.
But if you’re taking part, you have to be OK with the idea that Anthropic might train its AI on your business data.
Anthropic points out in the announcement that it doesn’t train its AI models on the data of its business customers “on our Team and Enterprise Plans.” But as we noted above, Anthropic is marketing CSB to those on Pro, Max, and Teams plans, and the privacy policy page for Pro and Max says something quite different:
“We will use your chats and coding sessions (including to improve our models),” the page states. “Chat and coding session data we may use for improving our models includes the entire related conversation, along with any content, custom styles or conversation preferences, as well as data collected when using Claude for Chrome.”
Raw content from connectors isn’t included, the page explains, “though data may be included if it’s directly copied into your conversation with Claude.”
This only applies to users who, under regular circumstances, have chosen to allow Anthropic to use chats to improve Claude, but it likely won’t shock any El Reg readers to learn that permission is on by default – Anthropic told us that it’s on users to turn it off.
If you’re copacetic with all this, you can start using CSB today – there’s no extra cost associated with installing the tool for anyone on a Pro, Max, or Teams plan. ®
