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Claude for Small Business

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude for Small Business

#361

Post by dperks »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #332
xienze wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. 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.

This is a comically self-absorbed perspective. Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?

I think the point is that you had to be deeply curious and more of a "hacker" or "computer nerd" type to be able to figure things out.

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#362

Post by nickjj »

prawn wrote: post #255
windexh8er wrote: post #240

> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude. > 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…

I suspect that the time spent on accounting or the money spent on accountants will influence decisions made by small-small business owners (1-5 staff range), in that some will take these risks. Admin is a huge pain for very small businesses.

With a bit of technical knowledge you can get pretty far with accounting without AI or cloud services.

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#363

Post by infecto »

Ucalegon wrote: post #349
infecto wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your deal about contract law? It’s not some mystical thing. You can get red lines with Anthropic, you can get a DPA with Anthropic. You keep going on and on about governance and contract law on a thread about how Claude Code is pretty useful for nontechnical people. Risk is always nonzero but you can already today get pretty comfortable with most of these orgs with some customization in the contracts.

Does Anthropic's DPA provide indemnity to code thats produced from the product and any damages associated with security vulnerabilities within that code? 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 ke…

I concede that I started the thread with a joke but wow you really are upset. Let’s take a step back. Apologies again for that joke it just the entire discussion reads like non-technical non-legal advice you get from the typical corporate IT.

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#364

Post by pastorhudson »

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…

Claude has an excel addon that is really good it can control everything in excel.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#365

Post by nsvd2 »

scronkfinkle wrote: post #280
mhitza wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> D.3. Limitations of Outputs; Notice to Users. It is Customer’s responsibility to evaluate whether Outputs are appropriate for Customer’s use case, including where human review is appropriate, before using or sharing Outputs. Customer acknowledges, and must notify its Users, that factual assertions in Outputs should not be relied upon without independently checking their accuracy, as they may be false, incomplete, m…

Maybe I'm misreading but that is an absurd ToS in this context. So they're telling us they have a solution to a problem, but don't trust it enough to solve it? I tend to be averse to analogies but this feels like hiring an engineering team to build a bridge, and they tell you they're not liable if the bridge fails and collapses when used to spec. If you don't actually believe in your product's capabilities, why sell…

The short answer is that presumably people are willing to pay for it

Re: Claude for Small Business

#366

Post by infecto »

caminante wrote: post #348
infecto wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your deal about contract law? It’s not some mystical thing. You can get red lines with Anthropic, you can get a DPA with Anthropic. You keep going on and on about governance and contract law on a thread about how Claude Code is pretty useful for nontechnical people. Risk is always nonzero but you can already today get pretty comfortable with most of these orgs with some customization in the contracts.

> You can get red lines with Anthropic, you can get a DPA with Anthropic. 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 ri…

I think you guys are hitting on very specific issues that would only be constructive in the context of the business group using these tools. There is a discussion but I don’t really see the point in this thread. I see some folks from more of an IT background pointing fingers instead of the discussion at hand. Absolutely groups need to work with their legal representation to figure out an acceptable level of risk. Everything has non-zero risk. But again none of these specific points really hit on anything for this thread.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#367

Post by michelb »

So this is explicitly for users/businesses held captive by big tech services and tools, which I guess is a very American way of working for SMB's. Seeing what this could 'automate' for my (European) company, this saves very little time?

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.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#368

Post by dperks »

noisy_boy wrote: post #299
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #238

There is going to be so many horror stories that will come from this, ie. Claude overpaid/underpaid my employees, Claude hallucinated the tax code and now the IRS is seizing my assets. etc… 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 incapa…

Certified AI Auditor jobs incoming.

Yes. Will be interesting to see how this evolves. Depending on the task, wouldn't be surprised if, between the cost of an AI tool and the cost/effort of auditing it, you go full circle and don't actually get an efficiency gain

Re: Claude for Small Business

#369

Post by chasd00 »

darepublic wrote: post #228
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…

I have seen people just generate large docs with Claude cowork and they themselves have not scrutinized it or know why/how it's useful. It's just kind of impressive in its volume and well formatedness. And then they dump it in your lap as being helpful

I'm beginning to see this in my industry (consulting). I was at a client site last week and in a room with some heavy hitters both from my side and client side but in a casual setting (lunch). Everyone was discussing how they sometimes "cheat" using genAI to put together decks when one of the out-of-the-blue 1 sentence questions that takes 4 hours to answer come down from the c-suite. They all said they heavily edit the output but at least it gives them a place to start. I have my doubts though, i wonder how many times they just take it as gospel and forward the deck on.

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.

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