There are a few places that AI intersects with the SMB market. Most of them are indirect or incidental, such as opportunities for SMBs to use general-purpose AI tools to help run their businesses. Conversely, the Localogyverse offers several SMB-focused AI tools, such as Vendasta’s AI employees.
But now, one of the giants of the AI world has drawn a direct line between its platform and small businesses. Anthropic, the new king of enterprise AI, announced that it will roll out an SMB-centric variant of its flagship AI engine. Known as Claude for Small Business, it’s a suite for typical SMB needs.
What does that mean exactly? Anthropic has tuned this version of Claude to tackle the workflows that are endemic to small shops, as opposed to big brands. This will take form in a new toggle within Claude Cowork. For those unfamiliar, Cowork – like Claude Code and other tools – sits within the Claude suite.
There, the focused version of Cowork performs multi-part tasks that SMBs assign, such as managing a calendar. As it goes with agentic workflows, possibilities are broader than a typical software feature set. SMBs can get creative to have agents run their bookkeeping, market research, or marketing assets.
Like Claude Cowork’s broader functionality, this will involve task orchestration that works across web, desktop files, and other apps. Users create “connections” between apps so Claude can do its thing. For SMBs, that could involve apps such as Quickbooks, Canva, Hubspot, Google Docs, and Yelp.
Early Mover Advantage
Stepping back, this move to target SMBs follows a trend in the AI world towards market segmentation. As we’ve written, OpenAI is building a ChatGPT variant for healthcare – a vertical that’s not only large and opportune but specialized. Anthropic is doing similar in the legal vertical (stay tuned for our coverage).
Notably, those market segmentations have occurred vertically, which we’ll continue seeing. Anthropic’s latest SMB play is more of a horizontal segmentation. This speaks to the hyper competition in AI as heavyweights rush to slice and dice the market to gain a competitive edge through specialization.
Of course, Anthropic will run into typical SMB challenges along the way. Brand executives have been able to effectively build agents and endure a learning curve because it’s an expected part of their job in a marketing department or wherever they sit. SMBs are different, spending all day as dentists and roofers.
So that learning process could take longer, as it often goes in SMB emerging-tech adoption. But this is a good step. Branding something as SMB-focused, and tuning it accordingly, should get the adoption ball rolling. That will involve a combination of self-serve and agency-delivered SMB adoption.
That last part is how emerging tech usually scales within the SMB sector. So expect to see SMB-focused marketing agencies and other resellers opportunistically infuse Claude for Small Business in their services. Given that many SMBs are asking themselves how they can use AI, this could resonate.
Header image credit: Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
