Anthropic is making a concerted effort to appeal to smaller companies. On Wednesday, the company unveiled Claude for Small Business, a new set of services tailored for customers that look less like Walmart or Starbucks and more like the local hardware store or coffee shop. Until now, the most intensive adoption of AI has largely occurred at the enterprise level. Recent studies have shown that most organizations scaling AI systems beyond experimental or pilot phases were typically large companies with substantial budgets. However, this trend appears to be shifting, as small and mid-sized businesses are increasingly embracing AI. Anthropic’s latest bundle of features aims to serve these new AI converts. These tools are accessible through a newly introduced toggle within Claude Cowork, the company’s task-automation platform for business users, which can browse the web, manage files, and execute multi-step workflows on a user’s behalf. By enabling this toggle, paying customers gain access to a variety of automated services, including bookkeeping functions, business insights, and generative tools for ad campaigns. The new suite also includes integrations between Claude Cowork and several software products, such as QuickBooks, Canva, DocuSign, HubSpot, and PayPal. “Small businesses account for 44% of U.S. GDP and employ nearly half the private-sector workforce, but their adoption of AI has lagged behind larger enterprises,” the company stated. “Tools and training are rarely tailored to the ways small businesses operate, and as a result their use often stops at the chat window.”

For founders and investors, this move signals that the AI platform wars are expanding downmarket. The next major battleground for user acquisition is not the Fortune 500; it is the 36 million small businesses that form the backbone of the U.S. economy. Anthropic is slightly behind its competitor, OpenAI, which launched Enterprise ChatGPT at the end of 2023, including an integration for smaller teams called ChatGPT Business. Anthropic plans to aggressively promote its new features with a coast-to-coast promotional tour, starting in Chicago and visiting 10 cities in total. At each stop, the company will offer a free AI training workshop available to 100 local small business leaders.