Anthropic Adds Sheets, Whiteboards and Meetings to Claude in Office Push
Anthropic unveiled spreadsheets, whiteboards, data dashboards and a meeting assistant for Claude, and Microsoft shares fell about 3% after the news.
Anthropic, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, on Tuesday unveiled a batch of workplace tools that make its assistant look more like a full office suite. The release includes collaborative spreadsheets, digital whiteboards, a data and dashboard product, and an assistant that can join video calls. The announcement drew a quick reaction on Wall Street: shares of Microsoft, whose Office software dominates workplace productivity, fell about 3% at midday, CNBC reported.
What Anthropic announced
“Starting today, Claude can build spreadsheets, whiteboards, and dashboards with your team,” Anthropic said in a blog post cited by CNBC. The company’s own write-up and coverage by TechCrunch describe several new or expanded products:
- Claude Sheets lets teams create and edit spreadsheets together with Claude, with multiple tabs, formulas, formatting and dropdown menus. According to TechCrunch, Claude edits cells directly and explains each change so users can see what it did.
- Claude Whiteboards is a shared visual board where a team can talk through a plan. Claude then organizes it into a workspace with timelines and deadlines, which can be turned into a document or slide deck.
- Claude Data, previously called Claude Dashboards, connects Claude to business systems such as data warehouses and customer relationship management (CRM) software. Anthropic named Snowflake and Salesforce as examples. Users can ask questions and get dashboards, written “data stories” or short narrated videos in return. TechCrunch reported that this product is now generally available.
- Interactive connectors let partner apps, including Adobe, Atlassian and HubSpot, open in full inside Claude, so people can work in those programs without leaving the conversation.
TechCrunch reported that Sheets and Whiteboards are launching in beta, an early test phase, on paid Claude plans across web, desktop and mobile. Anthropic also announced plugins for Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday aimed at sales, accounting and human resources teams. It said its Claude Marketplace now lists more than 9,000 connectors and plugins.
A bot that joins the call
The most ambitious piece is Claude Meetings, which puts Claude into a video call as a visible participant. According to TechCrunch, Claude can follow the discussion and draft the plan being talked about, sketch a timeline on a whiteboard during the call, answer questions in the meeting chat, and pull information such as last year’s figures from connected work apps. Notes, action items and other materials are available in Claude afterward.
The two sources differ on when the feature arrives. TechCrunch reported that Claude Meetings is in beta for Team and Enterprise customers and works with Google Meet at launch. Anthropic’s own product article listed Claude Meetings as “coming soon” and gave no release date.
Anthropic has added privacy safeguards to the meeting assistant. TechCrunch reported that Claude announces itself as a participant and posts a notice in the meeting chat. It will not join calls that include outside guests unless an administrator allows it, and it leaves automatically if an external guest joins. More broadly, Anthropic said Claude works within users’ existing permissions, that administrators can restrict what each connector is allowed to do, and that enterprise data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Why it matters
The release puts Anthropic more directly up against Microsoft and Google, whose Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace suites have long handled the documents, spreadsheets and meetings of most offices. TechCrunch described Microsoft and Google as the incumbents that AI developers are now challenging with office-style products.
Anthropic is not the only AI developer heading this way. TechCrunch noted that OpenAI released workplace tools a few weeks ago that let ChatGPT users work with company data and build presentations. Meta’s Muse AI agent can build small apps on the fly to help users finish tasks.
Investors are watching closely how AI assistants could eat into traditional software businesses. CNBC described Microsoft’s drop as a sudden midday move tied to Anthropic’s announcement. Microsoft did not comment in the reports reviewed for this article.
Anthropic pointed to early customers to make its case. It said the financial planning team at Advantage Solutions, a sales and marketing services firm, cut the time spent assembling forecasts from about 10 hours to under 30 minutes. “Claude took all of that off our plate,” said Ash Gupta, the company’s director of financial planning and analysis, in Anthropic’s write-up. Jon Dick, chief customer officer at HubSpot, said in the same post that work that once took hours every week “now runs in the background.”
What comes next
The launch comes at a busy moment for Anthropic. The company said on Tuesday that it had begun the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering, the series of investor meetings that comes before a stock market listing. CNBC noted that Anthropic had also filed an amended regulatory document ahead of the offering.
Several of the new tools are still in beta, and pricing details were not disclosed in the reports. Whether businesses move real work off familiar office software and onto an AI assistant will likely depend on how reliable these tools prove in daily use, and on how fast Microsoft, Google and OpenAI respond.
