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Claude for Small Business

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude for Small Business

#191

Post by ageitgey »

Ucalegon wrote: post #164
ageitgey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user 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…

>Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. 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…

These are largely friends and peers, so they ultimately own their own risks. But I'm not saying it is good or bad. I'm just telling you what is happening in the real world. Every senior person I know, whether a high tech exec or a solo coffee bean importer, is vibing to some degree. Some will be more successful than others.

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#192

Post by newsclues »

bandrami wrote: post #190
ageitgey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user 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…

Yeah I'm realizing now how many of you guys work in industries with no data security/protection requirements

There are requirements they just don’t get enforced enough to matter

Re: Claude for Small Business

#193

Post by invoicenav »

elric wrote: post #151
hommelix wrote: post #24

By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training. [1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/

OCR based invoice recognition has been a solved problem for well over a decade. Source: I've consulted for a company doing that. No exploitation. No LLMs. Just clever engineering. 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…

[flagged]

Re: Claude for Small Business

#194

Post by dools »

I’ve noticed that the emphasis in messaging and product from Anthropic is towards monolithic agent usage rather than building systems using agents or building more specialised agents. I listened to a talk by Boris recently and his vision for the future was that “the model just knows”.

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#195

Post by Ucalegon »

ageitgey wrote: post #191
Ucalegon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. 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…

These are largely friends and peers, so they ultimately own their own risks. But I'm not saying it is good or bad. I'm just telling you what is happening in the real world. Every senior person I know, whether a high tech exec or a solo coffee bean importer, is vibing to some degree. Some will be more successful than others. I've been working in tech since the late 90s. This is the biggest and most sudden change in co…

>But I'm not saying it is good or bad.

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#196

Post by insin »

CSMastermind wrote: post #53

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. 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…

I don't think it needs to specifically be a coding agent for the average user, creating apps for whatever they want to do, just something that can use code and has appropriate access for what they're already asking it to do (instead of the model bullshitting to them that it can do it, annoying them), and some way to make it repeatable when needed, like skills.

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. 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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#197

Post by vidarh »

elric wrote: post #148

> As part of our public benefit mission, we are committed to helping business owners harness AI more fully and effectively for their most important work. That's rich. What public benefit mission? The benefit of extracting money from the public?

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation. Whether you believe that makes a difference or not, they need to at a minimum pay lip service to that.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#198

Post by whiplash451 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #53

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. 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…

> a UI that makes claude code accessible

Isn’t that literally Claude’s web UI?

Re: Claude for Small Business

#199

Post by baxtr »

Ucalegon wrote: post #164
ageitgey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user 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…

>Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. 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…

What kind of risk do you see?

Re: Claude for Small Business

#200

Post by penetrarthur »

Is there a way to find "the concerns" of people from back when MS Excel was becoming a thing? Maybe someone here can share how people took the introduction of the early days "productivity tools" like MS Word and MS Excel?
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