Anthropic wants to help small businesses get started with AI

If you’re a small business owner looking to tap Anthropic’s Claude for the first time, perhaps start with a Monday morning brief that sifts through emails, sales data, and financial reconciliation to supply five key priorities for the week.

That’s the advice of Lina Ochman, Anthropic’s head of US small and medium-sized businesses and product-led growth GTM. She recently oversaw the rollout of the AI lab’s new small business-focused workflow product, Claude for Small Business, that integrates with popular business tools.

Small business owners have much different needs than a big enterprise, Ochman said. They’re often juggling “13 jobs on their plate and a long to-do list” and don’t have the luxury of, say, an entire department building dashboards to forecast cash flow.

“With enterprises, all of these workflows are just so specialized and so much more robust,” Ochman said. “We thought about it from the ground up—how does the small business owner…operate, what are the tools that they use, and what are the items on their to-do list that they think about?”

Anthropic zeroed in on some “repeatable tasks” that tend to weigh on small business owners, including payroll planning, month-end close, running sales campaigns, chasing invoices, and tracking financial performance. Claude for Small Business pulls context from a constellation of tools commonly used by small businesses, like QuickBooks, HubSpot, Canva, PayPal, and Docusign.

Many of those companies offer their own AI features that could already be integrated with Claude if users had the technical expertise to configure them. But the new service offers pre-built functionality—15 skills and 15 agentic workflows—for small business owners who might need help getting started with AI automation. The feature is available as a toggle within Claude Cowork.

“Small business owners told us that they prefer to be able to leverage the tools and have a connective tissue between those tools to run these workflows, so there isn’t as much context switching,” Ochman said.

The idea is not to automate the entire business, but “just to offload those repeatable tasks that are important, but probably don’t require as much brain capital and that could be outsourced to AI,” Ochman said. That should free up entrepreneurs to focus on growth plans or creative endeavors, she said.

Claude on tour: Ochman was speaking to us from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was set to meet with a group of local small business owners for a workshop hours later—the second stop on Anthropic’s nationwide small business tour.

In Chicago last week, she talked with operators from logistics, manufacturing, food, professional services, and healthcare businesses from all over Illinois with a “wide range of [AI] fluency.” Some of them were just using AI for chat-based queries but wanted to do more, she said. Much of the workshop centered on helping business owners build specific workflows and tasks, Ochman said.

Anthropic is also offering a free AI fluency course, which offers a framework for how to think about the types of tasks best delegated to AI, how to set them up, and what the constraints might be.

Nearly half of the US private-sector workforce is employed by a small business, but AI adoption among these companies has trailed their larger counterparts, according to Anthropic. A Goldman Sachs report earlier this year found that while more than three-quarters of small businesses report using AI, only 14% said it was embedded into core operations.

Ochman said she’s hoping to collect more thoughts from SMB owners as the tour continues.

“What I’m most interested in is getting that feedback into how is the solution working, which skills and workflows are the highest leverage, and to continue building and refining for small business owners,” Ochman said.