Anthropic released a package aimed at small businesses in May. Free training, a city tour, a set of connections to tools you already use, and a list of pre-built jobs.
That last part is the one worth paying attention to, and I will explain why after laying out what is actually in it.
What is in the package
Ready-made jobs, not features. They come in two sizes, and the distinction is worth understanding before you go looking for them.
Four complete workflows, each running start to finish from a single command:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/plan-payroll |
Forecasts your cash and chases the overdue invoices |
/close-month |
Reconciles the month and writes the P&L narrative |
/run-campaign |
Runs a growth campaign end to end, Canva assets included |
/monday-brief |
A start-of-week picture of cash, sales, pipeline and what needs attention |
Then eight smaller building blocks, which you call on their own or drop inside your own process:
| Building block | Used for |
|---|---|
| Cash-flow forecasting | Knowing what next month looks like before it arrives |
| Margin analysis | Which jobs and products actually make money |
| Lead triage | Sorting who is ready to buy from who is browsing |
| Invoice chasing | The follow-up nobody wants to send twice |
| Contract review | Reading what you are about to sign |
| Customer sentiment | What people are actually saying about you |
| Tax preparation | Getting the year organized before your accountant asks |
| Hiring packet | Job description, scorecard and questions, built together |
All of it is here: claude.com/plugins/small-business
One detail buried in the description is worth pulling out: most of it degrades gracefully. If a tool is not connected, the workflow still runs, it just does less.
Connections to the tools you already pay for. Covered properly further down, because this is the part that decides whether any of the above is worth anything.
A free course, called AI Fluency for Small Business. Built with PayPal, available on demand, and taught by actual small business owners rather than a product team. One of them runs a butcher shop in Brooklyn, another rebuilds machinery in California. That detail matters more than it sounds: the examples come from people who have had to make payroll.
A free half-day workshop tour. Started in Chicago in May, running through Tulsa, Dallas, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, San Jose, Indianapolis and a few others, about a hundred local owners per stop. Attendees get a month of the top tier included.
Now read that list again
Every single one of those is a task with a beginning and an end, that somebody in your business currently does by hand, on a schedule, and quietly resents.
Nobody there is selling you a better chat window. They are selling a list of finished work.
If you use it like a chat window, you will get chat window results, and you will conclude it is the same as everything else you have tried. That is the whole risk here, and it is worth naming plainly.
Open it with a job, not a question
This is the shift, and honestly it is the entire post.
Most people open an AI tool with a question. What should I say in this email? Fine. Small. You get a paragraph, you edit it, you move on, and next month you do it again.
Instead, hand it a job:
Every month I pull the numbers from QuickBooks, compare them against last month, and write myself two paragraphs about what changed and what I should worry about. Do that.
That has a beginning, a middle and an end. It produces a thing you were going to make anyway. And once it works, it works every month without you rebuilding it.
Pick the job you dread most. Dread is a reliable signal that something is repetitive, overdue, and eating a part of your week that you resent giving it.
The connections are what make it work
An assistant that cannot reach your books can only work with what you paste into it. One that can reach your books can answer questions about your actual business. That is the difference between a sharp intern who has never seen your files and one who has, and it is the whole reason any of the above is worth doing.
What connecting actually involves
If the word integration makes you tense up, it should not. This is not a project and nobody has to configure anything.
You open the connections screen, find the tool in the list, and click connect. It sends you to that tool’s own login, the one you already use. You sign in as yourself and approve the request, exactly like the screen you see when you let one app look at your Google Calendar. Then you are back where you started and the tool is connected.
That is the whole thing. Two or three minutes per tool, once, and you never do it again. You are not moving your data anywhere and you are not giving anybody your password, because you signed in on their site rather than handing the details over. Access can be revoked from the same screen whenever you want.
What each connection actually does
Running through Claude Cowork, each connected tool handles a specific part of the work:
| Tool | What it handles |
|---|---|
| QuickBooks | Payroll planning, the monthly close, cash-flow, getting ready for tax season, and the reconciliation work that touches every other system |
| PayPal | Settlements, invoicing, disputes and refunds, without you opening PayPal |
| HubSpot | Lead triage, customer pulse and campaign attribution |
| Canva | Content for every channel, editing with your team, publishing assets and tracking how they performed |
| Docusign | Sending contracts for signature, tracking where each one is, and filing the executed copy back where it belongs |
Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Stripe and Square connect too.
Full list of skills, automations and connectors: claude.com/solutions/small-business
Where to start
Connect QuickBooks first, before anything else. Almost every workflow worth running touches your numbers somewhere, so it is the connection the others depend on, and it is the highest value ten minutes available to you here.
Not because integration is interesting. Because unconnected, you are back to copying and pasting, which is the thing you were trying to stop doing.
What owners actually report
The customer quotes Anthropic published are more interesting than the usual testimonial, because of what they are describing.
A coffee company’s operations lead said it did not just solve the problem he brought it, it showed him problems he had not noticed. A CEO of a drinkware company said what they used to treat as hard constraints turned out not to be constraints. An energy company manager described it clearing out tedious clerical work so people could do work that mattered.
Notice that none of those are “it wrote a nice email.” They are all about the shape of the work changing. That is the outcome to aim at.
Where you stay in the loop
I want to be straight about this, because marketing around all of it tends to go vague.
Read anything before it leaves the building if it contains:
- A price, a date, or a promise to a customer
- Anything contractual
- Anything touching payroll or taxes, which your accountant should see too
Not because the tool is bad. Because being confidently wrong looks and sounds identical to being confidently right, and the only person who can tell the difference is the one who knows the business.
Use it to do the work. Keep yourself as the final check on anything that reaches a customer or a government agency.
Two practical notes
It runs in Claude Cowork, not the plain chat app. If you go looking for these workflows in the app you already have open, you may not find them where you expect. Worth ten minutes of poking around before deciding it is not there.
The tour is free and small. A hundred people per city is not many. If a stop is anywhere near you, it is a half day for a month of the top tier plus a room of owners solving the same problems you are.
The honest summary
The tools are converging. ChatGPT, Claude, whatever is next, they are all pointed at the same place: doing your actual work rather than talking about it.
What separates owners who get a lot from this from owners who get a little is not which one they picked. It is whether they handed over a real job or asked another question.
Pick one job this week. The one you keep putting off. Start there.