Anthropic adds meetings, spreadsheets and whiteboards to Claude

Anthropic unveiled three new workplace tools at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday: Claude Meetings, Claude Sheets and Claude Whiteboards. With them, Claude can join a video call, take notes, lay out ideas on a shared whiteboard and edit spreadsheets alongside employees, according to The Verge. The company also made Claude Data generally available and introduced interactive connectors that open partner apps inside Claude.

The launch extends a strategy that started with developers. Nicholas Lin, who works on product at Anthropic, told The Verge that Claude Code "changed how engineers work a year ago" and that knowledge workers are now "the gap we're hoping to close." "I think there's still a lot of friction when it comes to adopting AI for non-developers," he said.

What the three tools do

Claude Meetings is a meeting agent. It joins video calls and takes notes. After the call, users can chat with Claude about the plans and action items that came out of it, Engadget reports. Anthropic says Claude marks itself as a participant and posts a notice in the meeting chat. It will not join calls with outside guests unless an admin allows it, and it leaves if an outside guest joins anyway. Meetings launches first in Google Meet and is limited to Team and Enterprise customers.

Claude Sheets creates and edits spreadsheets with multiple tabs, formulas and standard formatting. Anyone with editing access can change a file, and Claude's edits are flagged so coworkers can see what the model changed. Files can be exported to Excel, according to Engadget.

Claude Whiteboards is a brainstorming tool. Claude groups team members' ideas by theme and drafts action items for each person. It can run alongside Claude Meetings during the same call. The Verge also reports that the tools can turn a presentation into a one-minute explainer video.

Whiteboards and Sheets are in beta for all paid plans, on web, desktop and mobile. Meetings is in beta for Team and Enterprise subscriptions. Claude Data, which launched in beta in October as Claude Dashboards, is now generally available on all paid plans. The new tools join Claude Docs, Slides, Design and Motion. All of them are built on Artifacts, the graphical interface Anthropic introduced two and a half years ago.

Apps inside the chat window

Anthropic also introduced interactive connectors, which let users open apps from partners such as HubSpot, Adobe and Atlassian inside Claude. The Verge gives two examples: a native Adobe PDF editor and a HubSpot marketing campaign tracker, both used without leaving Claude.

The connectors build on the Model Context Protocol, which Anthropic launched about two years ago. Its marketplace now lists more than 9,000 plugins, according to The Verge. Lin said the goal is to make those connections deeper, so users don't have to switch tabs to reach the services they use every day.

A crowded field and an IPO

These features are not new to the category. The Verge notes that Google's Gemini can already join meetings and take live notes, as can OpenAI's ChatGPT in some cases through its "record" feature. Google's office suite also has its own connectors. At its DevDay last month, OpenAI leaned further into integrated apps and connectors to support its Dots agents. What Anthropic adds is Claude's own spreadsheet and whiteboard surfaces, set up so the model works inside the file rather than next to it.

The timing matters. On the same day, Anthropic said it had launched the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering. The Verge writes that the company is under pressure to raise revenue and product engagement ahead of a debut that could be the most valuable public listing ever, and that investors want to see a viable path to profit.

Lin described the tools as some of the company's first native products for non-technical workers. He said Claude Cowork, an earlier tool for non-engineers, is essentially a wrapper for Claude Code. It was aimed at the "technical parts of [Anthropic's] non-technical audience." "Now we want to expand that reach toward everybody else," he said.

What it means for work

Meetings and Whiteboards target the routine work around a meeting: taking notes, sorting ideas, writing up action items and assigning follow-ups. In many teams, a junior colleague or the person who called the meeting does this by hand. Sheets moves routine spreadsheet building and editing to the model, and flags every change so a person can review it. That makes checking Claude's work part of the job for analysts, managers and anyone who keeps shared files. The connectors aim to cut the time lost switching between tools, though they only work with partners that have built them. Several things are still unclear. Meetings currently runs only in Google Meet. All three tools are in beta. And no one has yet shown whether teams will trust a model's summary of a discussion enough to act on it without checking.