Anthropic Eyes Customers Who ‘Spend All Day in Meetings’

Anthropic is reportedly readying new artificial intelligence (AI) products aimed at business users.

According to a Financial Times (FT) report Tuesday (March 18), the startup is focusing on enterprise customers rather than trying to compete against OpenAI and Google in their efforts to develop AI chatbots and agents designed for wider use.

The company is concentrating on how its technology could “help with knowledge work” for “people who spend all day in meetings or in Excel or Google Docs,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, told the FT.

“It feels like we should be able to make that easier,” added Krieger, who joined the company last year and is one of the founders of Instagram.

His comments came days after a fireside chat at the Human[X] conference, in which Krieger said the company — backed by Google and Amazon — has no plans to get into hardware or consumer entertainment but will stay focused on building generalist foundation models for enterprise use cases.

Kreiger told the audience Anthropic would channel its resources into enabling use cases for all industries through its Claude family of AI models, essentially balancing breakthroughs in research with practical product development.

“We want to help people get work done, whether it’s code, whether it’s knowledge work, etc.,” he said. “And then you can then imagine different manifestations of that” in applications for the consumer, small business and all the way to large corporations and the C-suite.

As PYMNTS wrote, that’s different from OpenAI, “which is not only working on foundation AI models but also building data centers and partnering with former Apple design chief Jony Ive on a potential consumer device.”

Anthropic also recently closed a $3.5 billion funding round, which tripled the company’s valuation to north of $60 billion.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors are still making products for business users. For example, Microsoft has woven its “Co-pilot” into its Office productivity software, while OpenAI is pitching “ChatGPT Enterprise” to businesses hoping to beef up their AI offerings.

In other AI news, PYMNTS spoke earlier this week with Aparna Chennapragada, chief product officer of Microsoft Experiences and Devices, about the shifting role of workplace generative AI.

“In the early phase, we were just adding AI to existing applications,” she said, referencing tools like Copilot, which can summarize meetings, draft emails and assist with research.

“The second phase is now about co-working and collaborating with AI,” Chennapragada said. With improvements in deep reasoning capabilities, AI is pivoting from basic automation to becoming a “thought partner” that can analyze complex problems and help companies make better decisions, she said.

Still, the “more interesting” change will happen in the third phase, which will be AI’s role in group collaboration, Chennapragada added.