Claude for Small Business
anthropic.com
anthropic.com
Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though.
90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents.
Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.
Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.
You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding.
WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.
Probably phone operators were not impacted too: SMSes bundled with flat plans are still flat plans and Europe style unlimited calls + 100 SMS per month plans are still there and those SMSes are still mostly unused.
So we could have a killer app and yet nothing changes in the flow of money around it.
UX wise, WhatsApp is a big improvement over SMS. Vocal messages, I'm not a fan of them. A waste of my time.
Mobile network operators lost the profits (at prices that were pretty much pure margin) they had on pay as you go messages, and messages not included in flat plans (e.g. overseas SMS's). They also lost a huge amount on highly profitable overseas calls. Those of us with family in other countries save a lot of money by using Whatsapp and similar instead of phone calls.
Net neutrality was triggered by their attempts to block VOIP and messenger apps.
I knew one telco who made €3Bn clear profit a year from 2 Dell servers and a team of five to keep SMS messages flowing. Their billing infrastructure was bigger, much bigger than the SMS servers.
It's called Zenning AI - we're a small team in London, testing it with a few companies at the moment!
It's targeted for creatives atm. For the few in private testing, it's been amazing what they're able to do with the little tooling I've given them. It is a legitimate change in their daily drive.
I don't know anyone not building a product in that space
I have a vision for what will be the next household ChatGPT:
1. An actually frictionless way of keeping the human in the loop. My product is primarily targeting that: Your tools should feel like an extension of you, not replacing you.
2. Juggling work. I feel like what I'm making here is the secret sauce, so keeping a hush on it :)
3. Keeping all your work in one place. Drawing, sketching, developing, emailing, planning, writing; there is no reason to depend on other apps if you have one place that does it all, and it's the best offering among them.
Edit with some follow up thoughts -- I think what I'm trying to make is best summarized as claude code for non-developers (that's what I put in my YC application), but I think what I'm trying to make doesn't quite even have a developer equivalent.
There's not an environment you can go into right now and say "after this builds every single time, deploy to this machine" and it actually seamlessly does that. The tech is there but making it a whole Factorio-esque operation is still very manual -- and that's what I'm solving.
Good for your feelings, but I feel the same for my work ..
The main problem is still, agents are not reliable and what normal (and dev) people really want, is to have them reliable. Or well, tools to manage unreliable agents in a more clear way.
(It is a big market I think)
Or, miscommunication.
You don't normally get raked over the coals for having an idea you're still carving out -- an idea that's validated in production, even.
That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :)
I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it.
Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.
The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.
Like Slack or GitHub or AWS or whatever. It’s almost always a net positive to wait vs do it yourself.
However, the temptation of productivity gains are strong, and few of the customers look into relaxing these rules.
What could possibly go wrong.
Also, would bet money that the derived data from the meeting-summarizers is being sold to hedge-funds, to give them a bit of an edge.
And if it isn't already, you can be that they're probably to start.
All those "difficult to program but easy-if-time-consuming-for-human" tasks, will 1000% be farmed out to models at unprecedented scales.
The incentives reward this kind of behavior. I wonder then how to operate in a world that is low of moral values and ethicality - does it mean I have to do so to have a fair shot? I'd like to think not.
* ransomware attack, fire in the server room, database HDD crash, car accident takes out the internet connection, ...
I can't wait for a Hollywood blockbuster that'll pretty much be science non-fiction.
I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.
I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.
There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?
Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
And for those who might care about these things, they’ll probably just be facing constant pressure to deliver more, faster, perhaps with less.
One of the issue about literacy in algorithms, data modeling, efficiency, development patterns, systems designs… is that people either aren’t aware of them (and in the best case scenario reinvent the wheel), don’t care about them, or feel they aren’t given the time to invest in learning them (or worse, might be penalized for it).
Enlighten us.
Progress!
(I’m half kidding)
Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.
Something is lost along the way.
Definitely.
My point is more that it seems to have been the way of the world for the past few decades. I’m arguing it’s nothing new, basically a trope at this point.
And once that is said, if we care about it, what do we do about it? Besides just repeating it.
You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.
I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.
I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.
Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?
Once they hit a wall, that is where you find out whether they are motivated or not
Yep. That has to happen first.
But I think the same applies to not just AI but various tools that have abstracted away the complexity of things over the years.
For example, I would imagine the average person deploying some sort of web app or API today knows far less about networking and infrastructure than someone doing it 10 to 20 years ago.
Compare that to say 30ish years ago. If you wanted to do something as simple as play a computer game you had to know how to navigate a command line, know about device drivers, make a boot disk, etc. Users were a whole lot closer to the realities of what makes computing work. And no internet, at least as we know it now. You really had to have a certain mindset to be a developer.
It's a far cry from "hey Claude make an app."
Planes falling out of the sky, trains crashing into each other, pacemakers downloading updates and freezing
didn’t we see this with crowdstrike
Then regulators will take things seriously.
gotta get a PE to stamp your LLM-generated code in sensitive environments.
Then why did I just spend the last few days releasing a slew of documents for a handful of trivial changes to an ancient medical device?
Someone should have told me that I could just ignore regulations!
Sounds like job prospects to me.
Probably "don't do anything to upset AI companies or you will effectively become a handicapped person"
Not that different from life in China: "don't do anything to upset Tencent and AliPay or you will become an outcast"
Or life in the US if you're a content creator: "don't do anything to upset Meta or Youtube or you will not be able to pay your rent"
The future: ToS basically becomes law, and you will be stripped of your own second brain if you violate it or say anything they deem "sensitive"
When the electricity goes out, (most) people get similarly upset. No electricity means no internet, and all of a sudden everything that people had planed to do can’t be done until the power returns.
Yesterday one asked another "how much of this deck did Claude do"? and the response was "50%". "What 50% did you do?" => "I chose the font and colors".
To put it another way, the customers of these frontier models are implicitly being competed against by the model itself.
Reading the first part, I was going to say they don’t even care about whether or not there’s a codebase. It doesn’t matter; it could be all gremlins and hamsters in wheels for all they care, and for all they should care. All that matters is the functionality, the value it gives them.
We’re even getting disposable code now. Entire single-use ephemeral web apps, built on the go to enable, visualise, or simplify a specific thing, then thrown away.
Will it all lead to some trouble? Definitely. So did computers, and so did the internet.
Weird times. Fun times.
I would get called in to rewrite it, using a proper database, documented rules and ensure it stayed scalable - and everyone would be happy.
These Access "apps" were abominations from a technical point of view - but they got the job done without having to spend a load of money on off-the-shelf or bespoke software. And the "tech guy" made a valuable contribution to the company. It's only at a certain point that Access started to struggle.
I foresee the exact same thing happening in the near future - except we won't be building the replacement apps ourselves - we'll just know how to give the coding agents well-specified prompts and tell them when they're making a mistake.
I think what a lot of us are concerned about is that the vibe-coded stuff bloats fast. It's so verbose and all over the place, that picking that thing apart will be a huge job, and relying on an AI to pick apart work that an AI already failed to maintain seem like wishful thinking.
It's literally "The AI is failing! Don't worry I'll just use AI to fix the AI!".
And even if they somehow weren’t, we’d just do what we used to do with documents to turn them into "chewable bites": chunking, extracting, summarising,…
What I needed to do was sit with a user (not a manager/the person buying my services) and ask them to show me the different things they did with the software. Then I could write a spec for the actual _feature_ and would only need to look at the existing codebase if they needed data transferring across[1]. I don't see why our new LLM-based future would be any different
[1] Of course this meant I would leave out edge-cases and/or weird quirks of the system - often this was actually a bonus as they were either no longer relevant or worked that way because that was the only way they knew how to do it
What is different on this one vs the others is I have Claude to help me data dive and write the boring CRUD parts. I am able to spend so much more time with users testing and getting feedback and just thinking deeply about how to structure things. The quality of what I’m building now has never been higher and I think it’s just because I have more time to spend with it.
My experience with AI has been almost wholly positive and I wonder if Rails is part of the reason. Such well established patterns and structure the agent one shots most things and I spend most of my time wrangling view code based on my preferences.
Its not a good experience,esp the "debugger" and its traits - but a good tool that just does its job :-)
Do you, and those executives, own the risks associated with that practice? Are those risks actually indemnified?
Its neat that 'anyone can do anything' but if they don't actually know what the risk to business or 3rd parties, why is this a good thing, especially in the enterprise where there are actors who are explicitly looking for this type of environment to exploit?
I've been working in tech since the late 90s. This is the biggest and most sudden change in company behavior I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close was the web 1.0 world in the 90s where everything suddenly became websites.
That creates tons of risks and opportunities. Good and bad. Maybe a great time to start a security company. But maybe a terrible time to be a small time web app developer when your clients can get 'good enough' in minutes for dollars on their own.
Wait, you exposed people to a technology, taught them how to use it, then you are not going to own the implications of that action without teaching them about the risks or telling them how they need to ensure they don't shoot themselves in the face or violate their duty of care?
Do you understand what you are saying and the implications of that in the real world relative to the insurance contracts that they have?
Your company is associated with HIPAA, you should have a much higher standard than this.
'Adding value' is a very interesting statement and way to judge the worth of something. Adding value to who? And if that value add also causes massive harms, how do we reconcile that? So you build a brand new app with does all of the things that all of your total addressable market wants, but it also exposes all of the IP your existing clients, does that mean you will be able to achieve that TAM?
Corp IT does not exist in a vacuum. Understanding the why of that isn't a 'you should just accept this' but more 'how can we make this better and avoid mistakes already made by others'. I will always point to aviation and 'bold text is written in blood' as a great model to understand all of this not as a blocker but, instead, as a building block.
In general, safe businesses can only exist with government support or government prohibition of all other businesses globally - and that is a very hard bar to clear.
If you care about data privacy, especially your own protected health information, that sentence should give you a lot of comfort.
In a HIPAA environment, people who are sufficiently trained on how to develop regulated software securely are called "software engineers".
In my opinion, agents will replace the majority of the rest of businesses before they are good enough at agentic engineering to be able to autonomously develop software that safely and reliably can manage PHI without a single mistake.
It goes without saying: never trust your PHI to any company who is vibe coding in production.
For big corps - this is different. But modulo hipaa - this is why they are gung ho hi about binding arbitration - they are trying to match velocity to some degree - and mostly failing…
From what I have seen - most executives would rather shut down the business and quit than accept the possibility of personal liability - and just avoid the regions of the world in which they do have it.
I think this is where we have the issue in my tone and approach to my comments. My response was based off of the OP stating that the people who they were introduction were 'executives/leaders' and not 'friends', which has a very different connotation when it comes to information security, liability, responsibility, accountability, and ownership. It was only in their response to my question about risk ownership that they described the persons as friends.
If they had said 'friends' from the very beginning, instead of 'executive/leader' I would not have had the reaction than I did. The reason why I brought up HIPAA was because of 'executive/leader', since the idea of duty of care extends to leadership within any organization, especially those who are involved with healthcare, which they know based off of their company.
But I appreciate you trying to police the expression of my deeply held beliefs, but, like, nope!
>"I’m a CFO and network regularly with other executives, board members who also are board members at other companies, investors, people who see a combined large population of companies"
The call to HIPAA wasn't about PII, it was about knowledge around standards and regulations such as HIPAA when it comes to application/information/network security is just baked in. Which is why the passivity around the statement made no sense given the risks/obligations/liability associated with vibe coding applications at the executive level, which someone who's company deals with HIPAA should understand and appreciate.
Never have I said that, and please quote me word-for-word otherwise, what I said applied to "very executive/ leader at my place of business who does nothing except work with PII data all day", that is a windmill you created yourself.
You can keep tilting at the windmill.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Ucalegon#48133230
You comments read like reddit clickbait. How many of these executives/senior/coffee bean/whatever ppl do you even know and why you the one enlightening them with claude cowork ? . "Every X i know" sounds like a large sample size. Make ridiculous claims by prefixing " every X i know" .
I feel so angry at this linkedin speak. so infuriating. Hate that we've accepted these ppl without any pushback.
I say this as someone who deals with sales/CRO/CFO functions quite regulary, I have to tell everyone that uploading contracts to Claude and/or ChatGPT does not hold confidentiality because files are not covered under enterprise ZDRs. [0] [1]
It comes down to 'everyone else is doing it' without an understanding of why, then past that, the what of how that applies to the specific business to find the unique value of AI to an organization that does not touch external networks.
Please give your GC the links below, let them look over your contracts and obligations to ensure you aren't exposing risk for no real reason other than saving a couple seconds for something that a SDR/BDR level employee could do.
[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/zero-data-retention#what-zdr...
[1] https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/your-data#zero...
It’s an interesting time.
where do you see this going/any interesting theories?
If its so obvious that everyone is doing it then you dont need "every executive i know takes a shit" .
every interaction is now laced with ulterior motives like op trying to pitch himself as ai expert to sell his courses or whatever. He is apparently going around blowing executives minds with claude cowork. so ridiculous.
With all due respect, I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm saying that I've observed friends and associates (who are executives, because I'm old and work in business) pick up and adopt a specific tool at rates faster than any other tool I can think of, which seems interesting to me. Do with that information whatever you want. It's just an anecdote from a random person on the internet. I'm sorry that this observation makes you angry.
I'm not selling or pitching you (or anyone else) anything. I haven't taught any programming courses since the 2010s (pre-ChatGPT).
> Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork
now you are saying you were merely "observing" ?
In a properly structured organization, of which there are many and who are required by regulations and/or best practices, senior executives tend to have need/role-based access to information, just like everyone else in the organization. So they may have access to strategic business information, but not patient records or payroll. They may have access to planning data, but not the financial records of individual or clients. Etc. etc.
Smaller or newer orgs may not have this compartmentalization, but in general I think the principle holds true for orgs over a certain number of folks in size.
Generally, when it comes to 'privileged' information within an executives inbox it is business information or trust releastionships and not specific PII/PHI of an user. It was me being terrible at trying to impart that even the most begin seeming access may have major consequences even if it is not a total compromise of everything given the massive scope of 'what could happen' with executives vibe coding applications, like something managing their inbox past their EA, or something trivial seeming.
These are 'proper' (sometimes) access controls, but can still be abused. Not from email...but you get the idea.
Compliance is due to the legal obligations thanks to local regulations and obligations that are defined through contracts with 3rd parties.
Saying 'found the Microsoft person' expresses a lack of understanding of the domain.
This is how IT acts in my enterprise orgs. There is absolutely a need for compliance and governance but unfortunately the people in these roles are typically not technically minded and have low incentives to innovate so you get these folks only really arguing for their jobs.
Do you think the MSFT sales person, or anyone who has the financial incentive to innovate, doesn't want you to innovate? They want you on Azure and O365 regardless, they don't care.
Hell, Microsoft will give you will give you 150k [0] of credits to do so.
But keep talking as if you have some magical, unique, special insight that escapes contracts and the law, compared to the people who, sadly, have to deal with reality.
Risk is always nonzero but you can already today get pretty comfortable with most of these orgs with some customization in the contracts.
IMHO,
1. Dismissing attorney client privilege is reckless
2. and the vast majority of users aren't aware of what "customization in the contracts" is needed to enable autonomous agents or if it's already contractually allowed.
This is still a fair question:
> Do you, and those executives, own the risks associated with that practice? Are those risks actually indemnified?
We are talking about vibe coded applications by executives and the risks that are associated with that, nothing within a DPA covers that. Please, be my guest, link an Anthropic DPA which includes indemnity for damages associated with the code produced.
Again, you keep showing your lacking of understanding of the domain in some really fundamental ways which shows that you haven't negotiated B2B contracts nor have you held a position of responsibility where you hold liability.
But keep responding because this feels more like therapy for you, and your feelings about people like me, rather than the realities of the exposure that come from vibe coded applications for executives.
Each entity and group have to consider the risks. I don’t think anything you’re trying to point at though is really useful for the discussion at hand. There is absolutely a use case for Claude code/cowork/codex and related tools to be used by non-technical folks. There is also a lot of figuring out in each of these groups. Unfortunately IT in most orgs in what I have seen have ignored the art of what’s possible for the last 3 years and now that we have hit this inflection point are scrambling to catch up but sadly the incentives are usually not aligned so they are really only incentivized to not take any risks.
There are significant reasons why an organization would not want to use Cowork, because it does not fall under Anthropic's ZDR [0], which is a huge issue for... anyone dealing with anything sensitive.
What I think this comes down to is that you value velocity regardless of whatever the costs. We will get to see how that solves itself, there are going to be a lot of billable hours that are going to figure that out.
But none of this means that you have any idea what you are talking about nor do you understand why individuals or organizations act the way that they do.
You are free to do it better. Please do.
[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/zero-data-retention#what-zdr...
My point has been consistent. You jumped to specific conclusions from a 30second post that adds little to the parent discussion.
I am sorry you feel this way, it does not change the facts of whats being discussed, its just that you disagree and you lacked the initial courage or intellectual capabilities to express that constructively, so you had to obfuscate through providing nothing of value to the discussion via low value comments. I get that YOU don't think something, but just because YOU feel something doesn't make it valid, grounded in reason, or should be listened too.
Have a great rest of your day and weekend!
Not sure by you keep thinking I have anything to prove to you. My point stands. The governance and risk are very valuable discussion and it’s going to change between industry and the trust level of each group.
Unfortunately most IT is short sighted and trying to play catchup. We had 3 years of thinking about how these tools are going to impact the workplace and are now rushing to catch up while also being insistent that Copilot is a worthwhile alternative. I generally disagree with that. I am not advocating that IT oppressive but that unfortunately most IT leaders are not technical and it shows.
You went further than "a joke."
You continued making aggressive, non-substantive remarks that were out of line.[0]
#1 > you have no idea about the details.
#2 > i don’t think you have a grasp what’s going on around you.
#3 > What is your deal about contract law? It’s not some mystical thing.
You wasted everyone's time.
Isn't it the uber model? Isn't that likely where the future is to go with this new uncertain technology that will surely create new unthought of verticals?
I'm using Claude to write large files too, but it's a very iterative process and involves a lot of reading and correcting.
to be fair, i've been guilty of this with code. Ask claude to generate a python script that takes X as input and produces Y as output, run it, pipe to more, output looks ok but i don't check everything, write it to a file, send it on.
I've been guilty of this and gotten pushback from my manager: "this feels like homework, cut these options down to 100 words each, max".
Curation and refinement are even more important when you can have genAI generate reams of text.
Seeking outside signals is even more important, like talking to customers, looking at real usage data, and more. It's too easy to trust believe what Claude tells you, even if you say "please argue against this idea", which you always should.
The word "more" there is doing a lot of work.
What is the "more"? Is it:
- more documents and text or more understanding
- more code or more valuable features
- more things to throw against the wall or more considered experiments
It's way easier to do the first things instead of the second.
Adding is always easier than reducing to the essence.
I find it interesting how herding agents has so much in common with being a team lead. Constant struggle between too detailed and too loose instructions. One difference though is that the team learns from you, but with agents it's only you who adapts. Saying that, because I don't count instructions or anything in the context window as adapting.
Someone will compete and take your place. Now you're expected to produce more, or step aside for someone who will.
Who decides value? I'm sure you can figure that out.
It matches the pattern of LLMs being very good at simulating the form of work output, which is an issue with code but it seems quite exacerbated with anything non-verifiable, like written communication.
Withdrawal symptoms. We've all been there.
We are now measuring productivity in lines-of-code. This is not going to end well, not to mention introduce massive amounts of burnout.
This is probably fine as long as the code is acting on local resources. The moment you have vibe coded software interacting with shared state or database the risk increases exponentially and all it takes to have a bad day is a poorly worded prompt from one of those users.
Some oversight by humans or automated guardrails will probably reduce those instances.
/s
A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM.
But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!
We're obviously going to be holding ourselves back in terms of scale and in terms of not being a "true" SaaS with this approach, but my thesis is that we get much higher quality results and higher compliance/activation and can charge more for the bespoke model backed by our own platform.
I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?
ChatGPT/Claude's web ui is much more like something for average user, tbh.
The power of Excel is not what it was. Nor is the power of ordinary thought.
Super early stage but I am really happy to read your comment.
I'm currently doing something like this in the internal model-independent LLM chat app I work on at a F100, specifically targeted at our everyday users. <input type="file" webkitdirectory> lets the user give the model read and write access to a local folder (and OPFS lets us reuse the same fs tools we give the model for files manually attached to the chat, or for files tools want to create if they haven't granted folder access).
Every time we used to release a new version it was "still can't handle the 6MB Excel file I drop into it" when that was being extracted to CSV and added to context - now it can poke about in the big Excel file directly with SheetJS to pull the sheets/headers and inspect the shape of the data, and use locally sandboxed code execution to write code against either extracted data or the spreadsheet itself via SheetJS for pivot tables and such (all locally - none of which need go into the context).
The base models are good enough at tool calling (I really mean Claude, though, the GPTs just go on a tear calling tools with no context for the user) they're already decent at automating stuff for the user without a dedicated harness (our default system prompt is still "You are a helpful AI assistant", lol). Add tools for Graph API stuff, and now it can pull the nightly batch file from a support inbox, unzip the spreadsheet within, diff it against yesterday's and generate an import file for new users and draft an email to welcome them, something that used to be a daily support task (which I'd already automated most of - but now you don't need a dev for this kind of thing). Or go find the big 450,000+ row spreadsheet that's being automated somewhere on SharePoint, pull it down in 150,000 row chunks (Graph Excel REST API limit) and write code to go figure out whatever the user is asking.
Having implemented and used it, I like this setup so much it kinda ruined Claude.ai and ChatGPT.com for me, so I've hooked up similar access for them using a browser extension to add the folder picker input, with the extension talking to a local server to tell it which folder to give access to, and Claude/ChatGPT talking to the same server over MCP via a CloudFlare Tunnel to work with the selected folder.
Isn’t that literally Claude’s web UI?
You should check out Cursor 3 :)
If you look closely, people we already creating databases and doing computation. But on paper. Spreadsheet software move the medium to the digital and with that brings a lot of convenience. Same with email, instant chat, and shopping on the web. The killer app is not about bringing something new, but making an old problem easy to solve.
The issue with LLMs is that it makes errors. Uncontrollably. And even if you can spot the obvious ones, there’s always some you won’t be able to catch unless you’re a subject expert. I’ve never seen a random people willing to monitor a piece of tech.
That would be a capable 'personal assistant', or 'executive assistant', of 'chief of staff'.
Why? because the point is, just like in real life, to abstract away the complexity, irrespective of domain.
"Average user" implies someone not skilled or savvy in the domain you're thinking of. For a medical doctor, the 'average user' is not-a-doctor. For a technologist, the average user is not-a-technologist. For an insurance specialist, an average user is not-an-insurance-specialist. Etc. etc.
The personal assistant, exec assistant or chief of staff are themselves not necessarily experts in any domain, but they do rely on specialists to get stuff done.
So the UI for this killer app is basically voice input, keyboard input, camera input (mirros of human output) in the user's language with natural language interaction, and the output is voice and monitor/screen, and possibly a robotic arm/hand/body (mirrors of human input). Anything more complex than that would require tailoring it to a domain/domains.
If you doubt this analysis, think of all those folks for whom the IE/Chrome icon was/is "The Internet". Sure, you can go one level deeper with having them put in URLs, or operate email through the aol/gmail bookmark or desktop icon, maybe open documents/files from 'My Documents', but are they going to go any deeper than that, for the 'average user'?
I really thought Airtable would take off because it was even more of a "database that a normal person could actually use".
It'll just be power users. We're moving toward a world of significantly fewer analysts and more into "Super SMEs" that can actually learn tools like Claude and manage enormous complexity with them.
Just giving average users these tools will produce garbage. This example from Claude is so contrived and any business analyst can see how a process that requires uploading additional data will fail. You can't expect users that don't even know their own data to be able to make this thing work.
There will be no "average" user in the future. It'll be multi-disciplinary SMEs that are extremely creative and knowledgeable about their businesses.
I think you’re underestimating “average users”. If we talk about the median, then probably you’re right, but if we talk about “the group of people clustered around the average” I think there’s a lot of untapped potential, especially in people who assumed data and programming were unknowable/impossible and have therefore been held back by “good” tools like excel
Learning how to type commands and use a terminal is not something people cannot already learn right now. And that was the way before.
I think the real killer app is making marketing and other non development (non analytical) work better. In case of marketing, we have tried many AI tools for marketing, and so far they mostly make campaigns more generic, less exciting, and often worse. They help a little but you need to careful that they do not to make it worse.
excel isnt used because it's a database, it is because you can do things in it in relatively unstructured ways and reference things youve already done with a click. the future of databasing is bringing more spreadsheet UI to the database, not bringing more users away from spreadsheets. with AI i agree there could be some sort of UI that could pop off that leverages it well, but im not sure its going to be t bring users closer to coding. I think it is going to look more like a project management tool than anything else. i mean shit, it might even just be an excel add-on because excel is still where the data is
Think the movie Her 2013. OS1 it's called.
These narrow integrations with specific software suites seems like a dead end.
If they can build an integrated AI assistant (what Siri should be) that can spin up and call agents it will be big (or it will flop but my money is on big if it’s the easiest way to use agents in your daily life)
This opens that surface area of attack again, but now on a much larger scale, if not careful
* find invoice I_E for expense E
* associate and categorize E based on I_E and transaction field
These things are annoying but Claude Code is great at it and it leaves a much smaller set I have to manually resolve. This is a class of problems that are tractable and checkable, which I happily use LLMs on. If it miscategorizes it, I'm going to see it because I'm looking over the accounts. In fact, I was previously using a different accounting app which had poor API support, so I dumped it so I could use Claude and it's incredible how much this helps me.
There is an enormous number of use-cases that Claude/GPT are good for and the hard part is market penetration here. As an example, my dad was looking at some statistical health survey data in India and working out what things you could glean from it. Claude identified the things that would complicate his analysis in no time. He's 70 years old, and he'd done it all manually until he asked me (I've got a Mathematics degree) if something made statistical sense to do. I told him what it likely was and then asked him to try Claude. Knocked out his work and mine in moments. But he didn't think to use it. Now I have to get him a ChatGPT/Claude subscription.
It's like how if you go to the Datadog pricing page they don't list a feature set. They have all these use-case lists with prices. You can build things using their base metrics functionality and logs functionality but showing the use-cases must have more adoption.
Interesting, sometimes they want to show you they’ll simply charge 2-3 percent of your monthly spend (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/?product=audit-trail#produ...)
I wonder if this is going to give text based accounting a boost. Reviewing clearly worded git commits is so much more reassuring then letting an LLM drive your accounting package and hoping it doesn't mess up somewhere.
1. Automated ingestion of hand-written tuition scholarship applications into Google Sheets. Near flawless OCR to structured spreadsheet ingestion and image extraction.
2. Revamped the website completely from a simple static website to a dynamic one which accepts donations (started with Claude Design, handed off to Claude Code). Old: https://csmforchrist.com --- New: https://stage.csmforchrist.com
3. Included sponsorship applicant pages (from #1) to let supporters read profiles and choose who to support through the website (this used to be a fully phone/email process before)
As an aside, it feels great to use AI for something that improves people's lives today.
[1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/
Or don’t tell me, if it’s well worth the 24min watch
Example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/18/why-former-fac...
AGI will solve poverty, btw. Any second now. Just need 500 bil more bro.
In my neck of the woods, B2B invoices are now required to be delivered over the Peppol network in UBL format, which further improves reliability.
Doesn't necessarily eliminate the need for an accountant, because the chosen UBL standard has lots of room for interpretation and ambiguity, and it's impossible to uniformly decide how process an invoice based on the invoice alone (e.g. is this deductible? is this even a business expense at all? which ledger should this go in? etc).
Payroll/reconciliation is already a couple of clicks and 2 humans sign off. A 'morning brief', well lol.
'Growth', how would you not know your numbers as an SMB? Everything is already in a tool with dashboards and reports for people to act on.
Also, I have zero confidence in the example prompt.
This all seems incredibly uninspired.
I can tell you the drag is between your own tools and the real world (which is very messy and inconsistent): taxes, compliance, payroll, amendments, share structures, etc.
Within my island, my books are in order, invoices and time keeping is fully automated, calendars and sales pipelines are connected.
I'm sure there are many businesses whose inner islands are not as orderly. The zillion tools out there all try to bring equanimity to the chaos and yet here we still are with fresh books, quickbooks, and xero...
I scaled to 30+ people with automated administration. My cost was under $150 a month for everything we needed to run a successful consultancy and product business. Our accountant was blown away by how simple his life was.
I'm constantly amazed at how it has gotten much worse in the resulting decade.
E.g traditional automation + humans handling the drag = $4,000 per month with a couple of known blunder each year
vs traditional automation + AI = $400, with unknown number of blunders.
Of course it depends how much a blunder costs, to solve, or swallow. But I would bet that accounting errors even for a small business would cost the business on the long run. And that's assuming we don't yet have adversarial behavior which we can expect to come from both the inside and the outside.
IRS is going to make a ton of money off you naive people. Get a better CPA who's not committing malpractice like your current one.
And your statement that “making a mistake on your taxes” results in penalties above $150k is so dumb I don’t even know where to start.
You know CPAs make mistakes all the time, right?
No need to have a desktop app to do entry.
Why would I worry about an LLM properly cataloging expenses (book keepers job) when we keep human in the loop with the CPA to check their work?
I think you don’t understand the problem the AI solved/reduced costs on.
The python script is basic enough that even I can figure out what it is doing, and I still have to review the import to GnuCash and reconcile with my bank.
It is saving me about an hour of work every week right now.
I think this is my biggest use of AI - making small tools to do the work locally rather than sending things to the cloud to be stolen and messed with.
Ironically for this thread, I think an AI redesigned website would do wonders here.
GNU cash website immediately tells that it is not a Saas and doesn't need to upsell the latest trendy addons, for it to survive.
It tells that it is not "investing" in marketing to eventually turn a profit.
It is not looking for acquisition opportunities or next funding rounds.
If you want to see what a trustworthy website looks like, take a look at SQLite or postgresql or even this website itself.
> Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system.
I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits? These are some of the last things I would trust an LLM with in a small business and on top of it Anthropic has shitty customer support. I will actively be telling prospects to avoid.
I'm quite sure at the time that they said they wouldn't give compensation, not that they wouldn't refund them.
It's not just about being able to balance Xero but knowing rules, procedures and the way the tax office works.
Those three letters "CPA" in one's email signature basically expand to "I won't fall for your low effort form letter bluff, you can't get one over on me that easily" as far as the auditor who's following up on the form letter cares.
- an Aussie half-wog
Claude still isn't at the point where I would personally trust it to be expert level in a field I'm not (very different story when I'm getting it to do something I do know about myself), and the risks of screwing up your reports far outweighs the cost of getting a human to go over things.
But 100%, I can see accountants that use Claude replacing accountants that don't.
(Also, if we're counting, I'm only 1/4 Wog. 3/4 grandparents are Anglos!)
Systems like quickbooks, hubspot, payment processors all have tiers where yes on paper they make it easy to properly setup good accounting practices, but you’ll spend an additional 500/month+ to get those features.
Hiring an accountant to clean up the books and do quarterly book keeping is equally as expensive if not more.
Especially for small service based businesses, where margins can be tight, revenue can fluctuate heavily MoM, committing an additional $6k+ per year just to keep books organized is non-trivial.
As an experiment, i gave all our finance data for 2025 to an agent, and it did quite well after spot checking. There may be a middle ground where users can do exports, verify with “real” software, and have agents handle contextual classification to considerably cut down costs
On the other hand I wonder if it will reveal the downsides of AI at a larger scale. Small businesses will have much lower tolerance for LLM inefficiencies. If it doesn't save time/pain it's just not worth it.
I run a small business (no employees) and GnuCash was ok. Then I got tired of battling it for years to do certain things.
Spent a few days human coding a command line income and expense tracker a little over a year ago at https://github.com/nickjj/plutus.
I do my estimated quarterly taxes with its assistance in literally 5 minutes. All I do is download the CSV files from my bank and run the reports I'm interested in seeing through it. At the end of the year I run through the full numbers and triple check things in about 10-15 minutes. These numbers give me complete confidence to file my taxes accurately from a business income / expense perspective.
Of course you can use the tool for personal income / expense tracking too. Personal vs business is an arbitrary category name.
A computer can help you find that problem, but solving it is still a human issue. One of the things people want to know about invoices is which are likely to be paid on time, as some customers consistently delay or attempt to avoid paying.
This is one of those areas I would spend more time checking the outputs than it would take me to click the button myself.
I’ve used xero and quickbooks and they integrate with many banks and expense management platforms to automate closing.
From the more obvious possible issues: no payroll, massive refund overpayment, legally binding agreement that puts the business at disadvantage.
FWIW, I like the idea, but I sure as fuck would not let LLM touch real money or pieces that can allow to move it around.
Full stop.
This is dangerous. Relying on so much of your business on a third party. We've seen this many times before where businesses get destroyed because something gets broken somewhere that they have outsourced and have no control over.
In my view this service should not be used, unless there is a local llm or clear manual alternative.
Then the question begs - Why use Claude at all?
Maybe a proof of concept only while you come up with a real solution. Maybe to use claude to get rid of Claude
The people who get dazzled by bright lights are going to be the ones licking their wounds later. There is going to be eggs on faces one day.
Must be nice being able to ruthlessly lie with "this is the future" marketing claims, while hiding behind this term of service.
It amazes me that we are going to litigate this like they did with cars over horses, or machines vs human labor. I honestly don't think Claude should be running companies.
If you don't actually believe in your product's capabilities, why sell it?
'"Claude for Engineers" coming to build a bridge in a town near you! You heard it here first'.
Anthropic's response: let's make a nice package out of this, and let's target specifically the businesses that are less likely to be ready to manage such horrible events.
It's just like getting Google support.
Also, small business contracts likely do not have the same type of language around indemnity/SLAs, so it is easier for the harms of this type of system to go unpunished because those who are harmed are even less knowledgeable.
No one is asking why we are doing all of this, just some vague hand waving that it is inevitable, predetermined, as if we are not taking actions that are leading to these outcomes, that we do not have agency. But if we all tell ourselves that the future is predetermined, that this was always going to happen, then we do not have to own the outcomes.
For alot of people who preached radical ownership within the product, they are not willing to take radical ownership of the product externally besides profit.
AI makes different types of mistakes to humans. They're harder for us to see because we're not expecting them.
The class of human errors I’m encountering most often are ones caused by missing context: misfiling of transactions because my bookkeeper didn’t recognize a vendor, didn’t know a transaction needed to be attached to a specific project or client, lacked access to my calendar, didn’t have my login to pull receipts, didn’t have time to understand a spreadsheet. Claude has ready access to all of these has been remarkably adept at synthesizing that to help it come at accounting tasks with a level of detailed-oriented obsessiveness that no human I’ve ever hired has shown.
Murphy’s Law is undefeated. Add in a psycophantic hallucination black box to critical business data and you have a recipe for hilarity.
Normies cannot be trusted to hand off these functions to an LLM because they are mostly incapable of verifying the outputs. Worse yet - these tools are actually idiocratizing the masses to the point they don’t even think they need to.
And of course Anthropic will never have any liability for marketing and selling tools that are unfit for purpose.
If you thought society was just an imaginary collective delusion before, now it can be collective hallucination too.
Not exactly accounting, but ChatGPT (whatever the paid model was in March) told me that paying down principal early would have virtually no effect on interest over the remainder of the loan. It was confused by the fact that it was a short balloon with payments amortized using a 30 year schedule. I did the math by hand to check and told it it was incorrect and it gave me the classic “oh yeah, sorry about that”. It’s the type of thing where for someone that is knowledgeable about the domain, it wouldn’t pass the sniff test. I am not sure if LLMs have a sniff test.
I can’t imagine how hard this will hallucinate when there are layers of accounting, tax codes, etc. But who will notice when it sounds so convinced it is right?
Coders don't all have those kind of security hygiene instincts either
Never in my life would I have thought a business with more than 100 employees could be considered small. In the EU the cutoff is 50.
My point being, they know they need to make a viable business, and they've clearly seen demand. Meaning there are already a lot of small businesses trying to use Claude to do these things.
Given what they have I wouldn't be surprised if they setup a pipeline of niche toolsets that they can spin up in response to mass user prompting.
Not a pretty future for SaaS and side hustles.
Since the "grand" idea is that all they need is the "god model with infinite parameters requiring infinite energy", the business model will align there.
I know that Google, Atlassian, Microsoft et al have been having access to our emails and online docs for a while… it just strikes me as naive to now sharing everything by default to a single company just like that. They are not just training on internal business data, I would imagine they also have plans to monetise it somehow
These "people" fundamentally misunderstand how tech illiterate the average person is and don't care about AI outside it appearing in their search results as an occasional convenience. My Mom (in her 50s) heard about ChatGPT for the first time this month and doesn't care about it, nor eager to figure it out.
Small business owners are not going to put their life's work in the hands of AI, they don't even trust the most basic versions of it and they're certainly not going to use "agents", and the ones that do trust it are naively going to overly trust it because the faulty marketing from these companies and very bad things are going to happen.
A couple more thoughts here - the hard part is not just the data side of it, it's replaying/unplaying actions. Many actions are non-reversible. Code is clean in the same way that google docs is clean. But for many business processes, some actions just can't be unwound once started. If claude initiates a wire that it shouldn't, no amount of git technology will undo that wire.
Ps.: see http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm on whether VisiCalc was the first or not.
You might be assuming small businesses have less than ten people. That’s a category of small business called a “micro-business” or microenterprise, depending on funding model.
In EU where I'm from the micro/small/medium business sizes are tied to both employee count AND revenue. Micro is below 10 employees and below 2 million € revenue, Small is below 50 employees and below 10 million € revenue, Medium is below 250 employees and 50 million € revenue.
So if you had 100 million revenue you would be a large business even if you had less than ten people.
Just today there are 3 stories on front page about Claude--seems to me someones PR is working overtime
In books of the future, if we ever hold one, I think this will be studied a lot. We have seen before competitions and rivals, but they mostly were rivalry of craft. Here it is a rivalry of velocity and reach. Who can first target user with whatever they have ready to offer.
Don’t worry, they maintain feature parity between desktop and web. It routinely consumes 2GB in my browser for some reason.
And what exactly would’ve changed three years ago compared to now?
Excepts it comes with a terrible experience that's not sustainable for any serious day-to-day work that doesn't involve constant coffee breaks to wait for some tokens to get generated. No thanks. They don't have to live up to the hype to be useful tools, and for something that costs me annually what I make in a day I'm perfectly happy with the value I'm getting of out of it all (even if someone else is subsidizing it... for now).
> going hundreds of billions of dollars into debt
This forum exists exactly because of these companies.
I think you may have misinterpreted what I was saying to be a reference to local models? I am not talking about local. You cannot run DeepSeek on consumer hardware, despite a bunch of people conflating "some 30b model trained on DeepSeek outputs == DeepSeek". But businesses can purchase fleets of GPUs capable of serving DeepSeek for an investment measured in millions rather than billions, and offer something 85% as good as Claude to customers while actually profiting on inference with a $20 subscription, without the massive overhead of training frontier models from scratch.
> (even if someone else is subsidizing it... for now)
That they are giving away something they cannot sustain is the literal entire point of my comment.
What’s that even supposed to mean?
[1]: 10x my $200/m bill
I guess it’s a price tier for agent farming? Bunch of agents in parallel?
Though because i have a sub i then try to work extra and /loop some to make use of my money. I use a simple home grown (all claude built lol) skill combo which i manage a TODO file, and then have claude read that and commit changes, and run a /loop against that.
Ideally i end the week with ~90% usage.
Just pay the excess to me and let’s pretend it costs 10x more then.
That narration will make it become the reality at some point. Stop it please.
What competition? To have competiton, you need to have a market. And to have a market, you need to have a well defined product or service. What these guys are offering is a toy, for which they desperately try and invent new potential use cases every week. Metaverse, NFT and Blockchain once again, "supercharged" by trillions of VC money, soon coming for your pension fund too. What could go wrong?
My guess is that they are trying to increase the cost of switching as much as they possibly can before the VC subsidies run out and they have to 10x their prices.
Possibly, could also just mean that they've internalized the bitter lesson. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
A skill cannot provide MCPs and can't provide custom template prompts, each skill is it's own slash command.
A plugin you can define N number of custom slash commands, and you can define MCPs as well as skills. So it bundles like all the things together.
By installing a plugin, you are basically installing a bunch of MCPs, skills and custom slash command prompts.
My experience running a few LTDs is that there is a gap between the accountants and what you need, and running an SME business means you are too busy not to do stupid things and the net effect is lost productivity, less entrepreneurial activity and less growth overall. Dealing with VAT, PAYE, and a million other stupid small things prevents most people from succeeding at running an effective business.
Claude and OpenAI have been surveyed to be most impactful to SMEs, and I think it’s only going to accelerate.
Hopefully this is hugely positive, I see risks, but I don’t see real societal downsides if people get AI to make their basic business operations better, cheaper and most importantly simpler and easier.
These takes are so uninformed. We live in a country completely captured by the multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that are meant to make us behave in whatever way makes the 1500 richest people the most amount of money possible.
I know they are trying to get their product to fit-in & justify the massive valuations.
but this ain't it - just like the other Claude for ** -- the market doesn't exist.
if they spoke to small businesses they would know their problems are either around marketing or data.
You wouldn't operate in any startup having a public camera streaming your laptop screens, most intimate tactical conversations and strategy to the open internet - so why give that data to companies who's sole goal is to make money?
eSignatures are probably in the top 10 at risk businesses right now. I did eSignatures before, and even I didn't buy a project just vibe coded the signature piece for a recent product.
Good validation that this is indeed a space the frontier firms are thinking about along similar lines.
Feels like they're just using LLMs to produce enormous levels of output, without understanding that quantity ≠ quality.
Large companies can navigate the waters with teams of lawyers and accountants.
I don't think it will be possible to run a small business without AI in the near future, as the complexity of the law will increase beyond any comprehension.
I don't run a small business myself, but I assume the scope of administrative tasks in such company is well defined and understood.
That's rich. What public benefit mission? The benefit of extracting money from the public?
Now I have claude hooked up to a dozen projects I used to maintain manually. It is such a pleasure watch it read the complaint and go to town on small problems without dropping any databases or removing home dirs.
Am I too close to AI that this sounds fucking crazy to me? In no world would I give Claude or any AI agent direct write access to financial operations like payouts/settlements.
does "settling" not mean, "writing", ie moving cash around for real
> https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
Reviewing automated output is very different from actually doing the task, and results in skill decay and atrophy.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
The gap between write access and humans just rubber stamping output is not much at all.
Turns out Anthropic is pivoting so fast that they're doing all the 'Claude for X' themselves.
Surely 'Claude for Cheese' is soon.
Inspiring quote there.
The funny part is Opus was the one which generated the files in the first place. This was Opus 4.7 High. So no thank you, Anthropic.
If you want to help SMB, stop with the interconnectivity hype of bringing outrageously expensive software together. Try making something that really helps instead of syphens more money and hurts the workforce. Seriously, what's Claude going to do for a landscaper using pen-and-paper anyway? That's the majority of your SMB. The grifting MSPs are your target for this bs.
Remote LLM's should be prohibited ASAP.
It has never been easier to give Claude a list of tools you want in your stack and have it get them up and running on your own server, including audits against exploits.
I want that Claude for small businesses, even though I understand why partnering with these other companies is the better revenue play.
Have you ever run a business?
SFDC announces "Headless CRM" and Anthropic is like meh.
Our company supports small teams in Germany with the use of agentic AI. We're guinea pigging this on ourselves. There is a lot of friction taking AI into use right now for people who aren't developers. Most tools are aimed at developers and are useless without a lot of complicated hoops that you need to jump through to connect stuff, deal with permissions, etc.
I'm seeing a wider issue that OpenAI and Anthropic seem to just have a few blindspots when it comes to dealing with UX topics and product management. Anthropic seems a bit ahead but not much on supporting business users. But not by a lot.
I'm more familiar with the OpenAI side. I'm a developer, so I can work around it. But I've been onboarding our non developer CEO and friend to codex so he can actually get shit done and it's not been pretty. He's constantly fighting with trying to wrap his head around repositories, git, having to edit small text files, etc.
Despite all this, it's hugely empowering for him to be using codex. I got him working on our website directly (content and design), he has managed to get his inbox hooked up and our google drive. He's working on presentations, sales offers, CRM topics, accounting topics, and more. Not your typical programmer centric topics (aside from the website). It's OK, he's smart enough. But I'd hate to go through this with junior business interns.
The key challenge I see is company level guardrails and skills and permission hell. I got our CEO on codex because in ChatGPT can't use tools or skills. And you need both to get productive. So Codex is the only option right now (in OpenAI). Claude Cowork and Claude for Small Businesses is a good move.
Skills are where you can express organization specific rules, processes, etc. Simple things like when dealing with gmail, don't send emails and only create drafts. Because we want people approving the final email that gets send, always. We have a growing number of those that are specific to our company and tools.
Another challenge I see is dealing with team collaboration tools and AI. We currently have these weird 1 on 1 tools where you have session with an agent to do stuff. But collaborating with more people requires proper team chat tools. That does not exist currently. I have some internal experimental setup involving Matrix, OpenClaw, and some skills that actually is super useful for this. But I would not recommend that for obvious security reasons.
Another challenge is that most things you'd want to connect seem to be completely unprepared for this. This is an industry wide problem that seems to affect most SAAS products with very few exceptions. Existing data silos are going to be connected to AI tools and this is going to escalate fast. So far, there's a lot of mumbling about APIs, cli tools, and not much else. However, most of these products are completely unprepared for an influx of business users wanting to do productive stuff with these tools and AI. There is going to be a lot of friction there and I think a few SAAS companies seem incapable at this point of adjusting their roadmaps and fighting their reflex to deny access to absolutely everything and protect their walled gardens. I think it's going to be a blood bath in that market with customers and users jumping ship to more AI ready alternatives.
We're only four years in to this revolution but especially with Google their level of preparedness with Google Workspace for this is shockingly poor. Gmail access is essentially all or nothing currently. That's going to cause issues. I don't think MS is much further in their thinking. And these two are some of the more clued in companies in the AI space given that they funded and invented most of it.