New Delhi: Artificial intelligence is moving beyond chatbots that respond to typed questions and increasingly becoming an active workplace assistant. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced new workplace features, including Claude Meetings, which brings Claude into video calls and allows it to begin working on tasks while participants are still discussing them.
The company also introduced Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets as it expands its range of office tools.
Claude Joins Google Meet Calls
With the new Claude Meetings feature, office teams can invite the AI to a Google Meet video call just like a regular participant. Rather than simply recording conversations and preparing summaries afterwards, Claude listens to the discussion and starts working on tasks in real time.
As participants discuss projects, Claude can draft plans, create timelines on a whiteboard and answer questions directly in the meeting chat. It can also retrieve previous business figures and documents from connected workplace applications, allowing teams to access information without interrupting their discussions to search for older data.
After the meeting ends, all notes, action items and materials created by Claude are available on the Claude website. According to Anthropic, the feature helps teams turn discussions into actual work while the conversation is taking place, instead of waiting until the meeting concludes.
To maintain privacy, Claude identifies itself as a participant in the meeting chat. It will not join calls involving external guests unless an administrator authorises it. If an unapproved external guest joins, Claude will automatically leave the call.
Claude Meetings is currently being launched in beta for Team and Enterprise subscribers using Google Meet. Anthropic plans to add support for other platforms in the future.
Visual Boards And Smart Spreadsheets
Anthropic has also introduced Claude Whiteboards to help teams collaborate and brainstorm. Previously, users had to copy and paste ideas generated with Claude into other applications to share them with colleagues.
With Whiteboards, teams can now work together in a shared visual workspace, where Claude helps organise plans, timelines and deadlines. Once the brainstorming session is complete, the AI can convert the board into a presentation slide deck or a document. The feature can also work live during Claude Meetings, creating content as participants discuss their ideas.
For spreadsheet-related tasks, Anthropic introduced Claude Sheets, which allows teams to create and edit spreadsheets collaboratively with the AI.
Users can ask Claude to prepare documents such as a hiring budget or a campaign tracker, and the tool will create a working spreadsheet. Teams can then continue refining the information.
The spreadsheets can include multiple tabs, formulas, formatting and dropdown menus. Claude makes changes directly within the cells and provides an outline of the edits it has made, allowing users to track the work.
Both Whiteboards and Sheets are currently available in beta for paid users across mobile, web and desktop.
The Growing AI Office Competition
Anthropic is also making its Claude Data tool, previously known as Claude Dashboards, generally available to all paid users. The tool connects directly to business systems such as customer relationship management platforms (CRMs) and data warehouses.
When users ask questions about company figures, Claude can generate interactive dashboards, written data stories or narrated videos. To make workflows more convenient, Anthropic has also introduced interactive connectors that allow users to open full versions of applications such as Adobe, HubSpot and Atlassian directly within Claude conversations.
The launch comes just weeks after OpenAI introduced its own workplace tools for ChatGPT, allowing users to create presentations and visualise company information.
Meta has also entered the competition with its Muse AI agent, which can build quick mini-apps to help users complete specific tasks.
With these latest additions, Anthropic is competing with OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Google to establish itself as a leading AI office suite for businesses.
