Anthropic launches enterprise agents with plugins for finance, HR, and engineering workflows

Anthropic launches new push for enterprise agents with plugins for finance, engineering, and design

On Tuesday, Anthropic unveiled its new enterprise agents program, its most aggressive push yet to integrate agentic AI into everyday workplaces. In an official briefing, Anthropic's head of Americas, Kate Jensen, told reporters that the new system would finally deliver on the promise of agentic AI. "2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise, but the hype turned out to be mostly premature," Jensen said. "It wasn't a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach." Under the new program, companies can use the plug-in system to deploy pre-built agents to help with common enterprise tasks, including financial research and engineering specifications. The result is a major opportunity to grow Anthropic's enterprise client base -- and a significant threat to SaaS products currently performing those functions. "We believe that the future of work means everybody having their own custom agent," Anthropic product officer Matt Piccolella told TechCrunch. Much of the enterprise agents program draws on previously announced technology, particularly Claude Cowork and the plugin system, which was announced in research preview on January 30th. The systems launched today are largely focused on making those tools easier to deploy within a company, including private software marketplaces, controlled data flows, and customized plugins. The result is a system for deploying Claude-powered agents with the same controls a corporate IT department would expect when deploying software. "Admins want to be able to have really, really, really tailored workflows and skills for their specific organization," Piccolella said. "And this allows the admin of a Claude Cowork organization to be able to do this in a very centralized way." The stock plugins included at launch take aim at particular departments present within most companies, including agents designed for finance, legal, and HR departments. Each plugin includes basic skills common across different companies, although Anthropic expects that companies will modify each plugin to bring it in line with unique needs and customs. In the case of finance, the stock plugin gives Claude the basic information and data flows necessary to perform market and competitive research, financial modeling, and other common tasks for finance teams. The HR plugin includes skills for generating job descriptions, onboarding materials, and offer letters, among others. The launch also includes a number of new enterprise connectors, including integrations for Gmail, DocuSign, and Clay, among others. Previously unavailable, these connectors will allow agents to pull in data and context directly from the linked system.

Anthropic's Claude Cowork is plugging AI into more boring enterprise stuff

On Tuesday, Anthropic announced updates to its Claude Cowork platform that allow the AI to help with a wider range of office tasks. Claude Cowork can now connect with several popular office apps, including Google Workspace, Docusign, and WordPress. New pre-built plugins can also automate tasks in a range of fields, including HR, design, engineering, and finance. Additionally, according to Anthropic, "Claude can now also handle multi-step tasks end-to-end across Excel and PowerPoint," passing context between the two apps. The update is Anthropic's latest push into AI agents, following the initial launch of Claude Cowork last month. Anthropic's coding agent, Claude Code, has been growing in popularity over recent months, even with Anthropic's rival Microsoft, which has its own AI features for office tasks. Earlier this month, Anthropic also released Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, both of which it says are better at performing complex, multi-step tasks, including work-related tasks like navigating spreadsheets. The new Claude Cowork tools will be available starting on Tuesday to all users on Cowork, which is currently a research preview feature limited to users on paid Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscriptions.

Anthropic Links AI Agent With Tools for Investment Banking, HR

Anthropic PBC is expanding the reach of its Claude chatbot into new sectors, weeks after the startup sparked a market meltdown with the release of tools that raised questions about AI's potential to render entire businesses obsolete. The company unveiled new AI tools on Tuesday for its Claude Cowork agent software that are designed to automate work in fields including human resources, investment banking and design. Anthropic said they were developed with partner companies, such as a plugin created with financial data provider FactSet Research Systems Inc. Anthropic and rival OpenAI have spent much of the past year developing artificial intelligence tools to streamline a wider range of professional tasks -- from financial services to health care -- with the goal of courting more business customers and justifying their lofty valuations. Their efforts to expand into new industries have rattled Wall Street in recent weeks. The quiet release of a tool for Claude Cowork to automate certain legal work wiping nearly $1 trillion off the value of software stocks in a matter of days. Shares of financial services also slumped after Anthropic released a new version of its Opus model that's meant to be better at financial research. The reactions reflect broader concerns about which companies and services will eventually be disrupted by AI. Scott White, Anthropic's head of product for Claude AI models, said the company aims to bridge a gap between the ways people use AI to answer work-related queries and the tools they use to do specific work. He said it's a "little bit of an overreach or overreaction" to connect market performance to a single product release, and that the company's AI models are helping its business customers grow. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business customers who use its models to streamline workplace responsibilities, particularly in the field of computer programming where it has emerged as a market leader with its AI coding assistant, Claude Code. The company recently raised a new round of funding at a $380 billion valuation.

Anthropic touts new AI tools weeks after legal plug-in spurred market rout

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled 10 new ways for business customers to plug in its technology to key areas of their work, weeks after other releases sparked an aggressive selloff of traditional software company shares. The San Francisco-based startup said its plug-ins could now help with investment banking tasks like reviewing deals, wealth-management tasks such as portfolio analysis and human resource-related tasks such as making new-hire materials reflect a brand's tone and policies. Other items that Anthropic touted included plug-ins for private equity, engineering and design. Backed by Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab, the lab also said it was releasing ways to connect its Claude AI to some commonly used business tools like Google Calendar and Gmail. The rapid-fire releases this year show how Anthropic is seeking to get ahead of the pack in selling increasingly autonomous AI to the lucrative enterprise market ahead of a widely expected public offering. Anthropic faces competition from Google itself, OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI, among others. The startup has previously said it has not decided about going public. Last month, Anthropic's release of a legal plug-in ignited an $830 billion global selloff in software and services stocks - including some of the startup's partners - over six trading days as investors worried that AI-powered automation could undercut large chunks of those companies' revenue streams. Scott White, Anthropic's head of product for enterprise, said the goal was for Claude to deliver better outcomes for customers, not replace them. "It's not a product that's trying to own every workflow," he said in an interview. "We're providing infrastructure and intelligence so our partners or our customers can bring their business knowledge, their expertise, their trusted relationships and their customers to the equation." Anthropic said its new plug-ins were developed jointly with partners, among them LSEG (LSEG.L), opens new tab and FactSet (FDS.N), opens new tab. It also said companies including Thomson Reuters (TRI.TO), opens new tab, which owns Reuters news agency, and RBC Wealth Management (RY.TO), opens new tab were using AI agents powered by Anthropic. Companies can build and manage their own plug-ins as well, Anthropic said. Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Kevin Buckland Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Anthropic updates Claude Cowork tool built to give the average office worker a productivity boost

Anthropic's Claude Cowork, which rocked Wall Street last month, is getting a wider release. The artificial intelligence startup launched a series of connectors and plugins for the knowledge worker tool on Tuesday that enterprises can use to help "turbo charge" the capabilities of individual employees. Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in a research capacity last month, rattling software stocks as investors grappled with AI's disruptive potential. The company said Claude Cowork's new updates mark its transition into a true enterprise-grade product. Starting Tuesday, organizations will be able to connect Claude Cowork to their existing tools like Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign and FactSet. They can also deploy customizable plugins across domains like financial analysis, engineering and human resources that encode institutional knowledge and workflows, Anthropic said. "We're trying to make it much more accessible and much more ready for anyone to be able to use," Kate Jensen, Head of Americas at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview. Investors were on edge ahead of Anthropic's expected announcement. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF closed down nearly 5% on Monday.

Anthropic's Claude Comes for Knowledge Work as Markets Freak Out

Anthropic is coming for knowledge work. Earlier this month, the debut of AI assistant Claude Cowork and the subsequent release of industry-specific plug-ins, such as Legal, made waves. Worried investors sent software stocks spiraling down, as the market tried (and is still trying) to contend with a possible major AI disruption to the way we work. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced Cowork plugins targeting even more lines of work, giving organizations the ability to build their own, customized private plugins from scratch with the help of Claude. Using Claude Cowork's pre-built plug-ins, companies can now make AI agents to theoretically automate work across HR, design, engineering, operations, financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and more. The AI agents can also now connect to Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, DocuSign, FactSet, LegalZoom, WordPress, and other apps. On top of the Cowork announcements, Anthropic also shared that Claude can now edit files and pass context between Cowork, Excel, and PowerPoint, so if you are using it on one document, it will remember what you're working on when you switch to another. "In 2025, Claude transformed how developers work, and in 2026, it will do the same for knowledge work," Anthropic's head of Americas Kate Jensen said in a briefing on Tuesday. That's roughly in line with what Wall Street seems to believe, as well. Following an AI thought experiment published Sunday on Substack detailing how AI can cause widespread annihilation of white-collar work and skyrocketing unemployment, the market went into a sell frenzy. "The impact of this technology on the economy and on the labor market more broadly will be in some sense shaped by whether tasks become automated or whether they augment how we do our work," Anthropic head of economics Peter McCrory said in the briefing. "An interesting thing that we see in the data when we turn our attention to how businesses are embedding Claude in their workflows through the API is that we see overwhelmingly [that] Claude is being embedded in automated ways." Leading Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson found in a study last year that AI-related employment declines in the U.S. were largely concentrated in jobs where AI was used to completely or partially automate rather than augment. AI companies aren't helpless bystanders, though. The economist argues AI integration should follow augmentation instead of automation, and to do so, AI companies should develop benchmarks to test how well models can collaborate with humans to jointly solve tasks, rather than focusing on perfecting AI in the absence of humans. McCrory is worried about AI automating "pure implementation" jobs like data entry workers who handle unstructured data or technical writers who synthesize and explain jargon in an accessible way. He says that Claude is already being used for the central tasks associated with those kinds of jobs, making them more at risk of displacement. Another way that AI has been showing up in employment trends is through its impact on early-career workers. Just last week, the Irish government released a report saying that it was already starting to see AI impact job growth for workers aged 15 to 29 in high-risk sectors like financial services and information and communication technologies. The Irish report aligns with Brynjolfsson's findings from the August study focusing on the American job market. While American authorities haven't released official data on AI's impact on young workers, Fed Chair Jerome Powell did concede in September that AI is probably a factor in the dismal early-career employment trends in the U.S. But except for finance and technology, AI adoption rates across sectors are still relatively low, and some experts remain skeptical about AI's power to completely disrupt the labor market. Whether Anthropic's Cowork assistants or any competitors can change that is, for now, a matter of speculation. Anthropic, for its part, seems determined. "There's no aspect of the economy that's not set to change," McCrory said.

Anthropic launches job-specific tools

Why it matters: Anthropic is making Claude easier to use for enterprises as it works to become the go-to AI platform for businesses. State of play: Anthropic's latest plugins let Claude act as a conductor working in other apps or systems in continually more autonomous ways. * When a user prompts Claude to do something, instead of it feeding back instructions, it can go do it: connecting with other programs, or completing tasks in Excel or PowerPoint without the user being involved. * The plugins are meant to be customized and trained by so-called "power users" at different companies. Those users will help design plugins that can then be easily used by more novice team members. The other side: OpenAI launched its own enterprise platform to manage corporate AI agents earlier this month. Zoom in: Some of the companies that investors worry AI will kill are instead partnering with Anthropic on these plugins, and their stocks are up as a result. * DocuSign and Intuit stocks rallied off the back of their partnership announcements with Anthropic. Threat level: It can also connect with Google's apps, including Google Drive and Gmail. * It's interesting that Google allowed that given its own AI ambitions with its model, Gemini. What we're watching: To what extent these tools actually drive enterprise revenue.

Anthropic unveils new business tools after release sparked market sell-off

AI firm Anthropic unveiled a new set of connectors and plug-ins for its productivity tool on Tuesday, following a series of recent updates that roiled financial markets. The updates to AI tool Claude Cowork were designed to "make it easier to create, use, and manage plugins" across organizations, according to a blog post outlining the changes. Organizations will now be able to connect to software providers such as Google Workspace, DocuSign, and LegalZoom, the company said. "Cowork handles complex tasks best when connected to the tools you already use. Connectors bring Claude closer to where your work lives -- helping you move faster across tools, not replace the expertise or software you rely on," the post noted. The update comes weeks after Anthropic released a legal plug-in that triggered an $830 billion global selloff of software and service stocks, according to Reuters. The company also introduced expanded plug-ins to help streamline workflows and complete administrative tasks across a range of industries, from human resources to engineering to investment banking. "Each was designed with practitioners in the relevant field, so workflows, terminology, and outputs reflect how that work actually gets done," the company said. Anthropic's latest release also comes the same day as CEO Dario Amodei is set to meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid ongoing discussions about the U.S. military's use of Claude. A dispute with the Pentagon centers on the company's usage policy, which prohibits its AI models from being used to conduct mass surveillance or develop weapons that can be used without human oversight. Hegseth is reportedly considering cancelling a $200 million contract awarded last summer as the Trump administration pushed for greater AI adoption across government agencies. Former OpenAI employees started Anthropic in 2021, and the two have since been locked in a public battle to win over corporate clients that has intensified in recent weeks, following a pair of controversial Super Bowl ads. The commercials paid for by Anthropic took a swing at OpenAI for placing ads on free and cheaper versions of its AI language model ChatGPT.

After IT, Anthropic targets new industries with 10 fresh AI use cases

Anthropic Claude AI 10 new enterprise AI tools: AI firm Anthropic is expanding Claude's reach beyond IT with 10 new enterprise plug-ins for sectors like investment banking and HR. These tools, developed with partners like LSEG and Slack, aim to enhance workflows by integrating business expertise, not replace employees. This move intensifies competition for traditional software providers. Anthropic Claude AI 10 new enterprise AI tools: Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is widening its focus beyond traditional IT functions, unveiling 10 new enterprise plug-ins designed to bring its Claude AI into departments ranging from investment banking to human resources. The San Francisco-based company said the new tools will help businesses handle tasks such as reviewing investment banking deals, analyzing wealth management portfolios, and creating new-hire materials that reflect a company's brand tone and internal policies, as per a Reuters report. Additional plug-ins are aimed at private equity, engineering, and design teams. The move comes less than a month after Anthropic introduced earlier plugins for Claude, releases that rattled Wall Street and contributed to a sharp selloff in software and services stocks as investors worried AI automation could disrupt established revenue models. This time, Anthropic is emphasizing collaboration rather than replacement. Scott White, the company's head of product for enterprise said, "It's not a product that's trying to own every workflow," adding, "We're providing infrastructure and intelligence so our partners or our customers can bring their business knowledge, their expertise, their trusted relationships and their customers to the equation," as quoted by Reuters. Also read: Quote of the day by Dustin Hoffman: 'Better to be fired than to do bad...' - lessons on work ethic, professionalism and integrity by the Oscar-winning actor of Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man The new capabilities were developed with partners including LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce's Slack, and DocuSign. Anthropic said companies such as Thomson Reuters and RBC Wealth Management are already using AI agents powered by Claude. Shares of several partner companies rose following the announcement. Salesforce climbed 4%, FactSet gained 5%, and DocuSign jumped nearly 6%. Anthropic, which is backed by Alphabet and Amazon, also said it is releasing new ways to connect Claude to commonly used business tools such as Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Drive, DocuSign, and LegalZoom. The company is also allowing customers to build customized plug-ins tailored to specific internal tasks. According to Matt Piccolella, who works on products at Anthropic, enterprises could eventually create "dozens, hundreds, or even thousands" of these mini-app-like plug-ins and distribute them across departments, as per a Yahoo Finance report. Anthropic is offering a marketplace where companies can host and manage these internal tools. Piccolella explained, "We think that enterprises will be able to build hundreds of these things and then distribute them to their employees," adding, "So whether it's each department wanting its own plugin, whether it's different kinds of workflows or different things that companies are doing, they can build plugins for those that are custom to their company," as quoted by Yahoo Finance. Also read: Bitcoin (BTC USD) is 50% down from its peak - where is the world's largest crypto headed The broader push into enterprise functions has intensified concerns that AI firms like OpenAI and xAI could challenge traditional software providers, either by building rival software or enabling businesses to create their own. Since Anthropic first announced Claude-focused enterprise tools in late January, shares of major software companies have fallen sharply. ServiceNow is down more than 23%, Salesforce has dropped 22%, Snowflake is off 20%, Intuit has declined 33%, and Thomson Reuters has fallen 31%. Anthropic's earlier launch of Claude Code Security, designed to scan codebases for vulnerabilities and suggest patches for human review, also pressured cybersecurity stocks. CrowdStrike and Zscaler fell more than 7%, while Palo Alto Networks dropped 2.6%. Which major companies are partnering with Anthropic? Partners include LSEG, FactSet, Slack, and DocuSign, while companies like Thomson Reuters and RBC Wealth Management are already using Claude-powered agents. Is Claude replacing employees? No. According to company executives, the goal is to support teams with infrastructure and intelligence, not take over entire workflows.

US Stocks: Anthropic touts new AI tools weeks after legal plug-in spurred market rout

Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled 10 new ways for business customers to plug in its technology to key areas of their work, weeks after other releases sparked an aggressive selloff in traditional software ⁠company shares. Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled 10 new ways for business customers to plug in its technology to key areas of their work, weeks after other releases sparked an aggressive selloff in traditional software ⁠company shares. The ⁠San Francisco-based startup said its plug-ins could now help with investment banking tasks like reviewing deals, wealth-management tasks such as portfolio analysis and human resource-related tasks such as making new-hire materials reflect a brand's tone and policies. Other items that Anthropic touted included plug-ins for private equity, engineering and design. Anthropic said its new plug-ins were developed with partners, including LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce's Slack, and DocuSign. Companies including Thomson Reuters, which owns Reuters news agency, and RBC Wealth ⁠Management were using AI agents powered by Anthropic, it said. The announcement lifted the shares of Anthropic's partner companies - Salesforce rose 4%, FactSet 5% and DocuSign nearly 6%. Backed by ⁠Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com , the lab said it was releasing ways to connect its Claude AI to some commonly used business tools like Google Calendar and Gmail. The rapid-fire releases this year show how Anthropic is seeking to get ahead of the pack in selling autonomous AI to the lucrative enterprise market ahead of a widely expected public offering. Anthropic faces competition from Google itself, OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI, among others. The startup has said it has not decided about going public. Last month, Anthropic's release of a legal plug-in ignited an $830 billion global selloff in software and services stocks, including some of the startup's partners, over six trading days as investors worried ⁠that AI-powered automation could undercut a revenue streams of these companies. Scott White, Anthropic's head of product for enterprise, said the goal was for Claude to deliver better outcomes for customers, not replace them. "It's not a product that's trying to own every workflow," he said in an interview. "We're providing infrastructure and intelligence so our partners or our customers can bring their business knowledge, their expertise, their trusted relationships and their customers to the equation." Companies can build and manage their own plug-ins as well, Anthropic said.

Anthropic Expands Claude to Cover HR and Investment Banking | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The artificial intelligence startup announced the expansions of its chatbot Tuesday during a livestream event, the report said. The rollout comes weeks after Anthropic triggered stock market turmoil with the launch of new tools that raised questions about whether AI could make entire business types obsolete. During the livestream, Anthropic said it will let business customers tailor plug-ins to meet their organizations' standards, according to the report. Many of Anthropic's new customization offerings are aimed at the finance industry, with new plugins designed for areas like financial analysis, private equity and wealth management. Anthropic and competitor OpenAI have spent much of the last year working on AI tools to streamline various professional tasks, efforts that have shaken Wall Street over the past few weeks, the report said. Several cybersecurity software companies saw their share prices fall last week following Anthropic's launch of new security capabilities for Claude, for example. Scott White, Anthropic's head of product for Claude AI models, said, per the Bloomberg report, it's a "little bit of an overreach or overreaction" to tie market behavior to a single product release, and the company's AI tools are helping its business clients grow. Meanwhile, although bigger enterprises "are treating AI as a moonshot for enterprise-wide transformation, middle-market companies have more practical ... outcomes in mind," PYMNTS reported Tuesday. These medium-sized firms, which account for one-third of GDP and private sector employment in the United States, don't have multimillion-dollar AI labs or large data science teams. That means their chief financial officers are interested in how the technology can do the heavy lifting of corporate finance, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report "What Happens When CFOs Get Serious About Gen AI." The report found that 87% of CFOs at mid-market companies are turning to AI to handle financial reporting work, which can drag out reporting cycles. These tasks include "extracting often-messy data across multiple systems, flagging anomalies for human review and churning out management narratives," PYMNTS reported Tuesday. "The result? Faster, cleaner statements with less of the exhausting scramble."