An SI Can Now Sit In on Your Work Meetings and Do the Follow-Up Before You Hang Up

Everybody knows how a work meeting goes. Forty minutes of talk, a few good ideas, and then everyone hangs up and the real work starts: somebody writes the plan, somebody builds the spreadsheet, somebody chases down last year’s numbers. On Tuesday, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, said it wants its SI sitting in that meeting and doing the homework while you are still talking.

At an event in San Francisco, Anthropic unveiled Claude Meetings, along with a shared whiteboard and a spreadsheet tool. Put together, it is the company’s clearest move yet to turn its chatbot into a full office suite, and a direct shot at Microsoft and Google, which have owned that ground for decades.

A coworker that drafts while you talk

Here is how Claude Meetings works. A team adds Claude to a video call, and it shows up as a visible participant, right there in the grid with everyone else. As people talk, it follows the conversation and starts working. According to TechCrunch, it can draft the plan being discussed, sketch out a timeline on a whiteboard, answer questions in the meeting chat, and reach into a company’s connected work apps to pull up information such as last year’s figures.

When the call ends, the notes, action items and anything Claude built during the meeting are waiting in the person’s Claude account. Anthropic’s pitch is simple: the follow-up work usually starts after everyone hangs up, and now it can start before.

For now it only works in Google Meet, which is a little ironic, since Google already offers its own meeting helper through Gemini there, as Engadget pointed out. It is in beta, meaning an early test version, and only for businesses on Anthropic’s Team and Enterprise plans. Regular paying subscribers can’t invite it to a call yet.

Who’s listening, and when

The first question most people will ask is the right one: is a machine quietly recording my meetings? Anthropic seems to know it. The company says Claude “marks itself as a participant and posts a notice in the meeting’s chat,” according to Engadget. Nobody should be able to say they didn’t know it was there.

There is also a hard line around outsiders. Claude “won’t join a call with outside guests unless an admin allows it, and it leaves if one joins anyway,” Anthropic said. So if a customer, a vendor or a job candidate hops on the call, the SI is supposed to walk out of the room unless the company has deliberately said otherwise.

That rule matters more than it sounds. Plenty of states require everyone on a call to agree before it is recorded, and plenty of clients would not love learning that a software company’s SI had been taking notes on their deal. Anthropic is putting the decision in the hands of the company’s administrator, the person who manages its accounts, rather than whoever happens to start the call. Whether every business sets that switch carefully is another question.

A whiteboard and a spreadsheet, too

The meeting tool was the headline, but Anthropic rolled out two more pieces that work with it.

Claude Whiteboards is a shared board where a team throws ideas around and Claude organizes them. In a project review, Anthropic says, everyone can drop in their notes and Claude will “group them by theme and draft the action items for each person.” A team can talk through a messy plan out loud and Claude can turn it into a timeline with owners and dates. When the brainstorm is over, it can turn the board into a document or a slide deck. The board also works inside a meeting, so it fills in while people talk.

Claude Sheets is a spreadsheet the SI builds and edits alongside you. Ask for a campaign tracker or a hiring budget and it generates a working sheet with multiple tabs, formulas, formatting and drop-down menus, Anthropic says. It edits cells right next to the team and highlights each change so you can see what it touched. Anthropic admits the sheets are basic for now. When you need the full power of Excel, you can export the file or use the company’s separate tool that works inside Excel.

Both are in beta for all paid plans on the web, desktop and mobile, according to Anthropic. The company also took the beta label off Claude Data, a tool introduced in October as Claude Dashboards, which connects to the systems where companies keep their numbers and answers questions with charts, written summaries or short narrated videos.

The fight for your workday

Step back and the bigger story is the race to own the place where you spend your workday. The Verge put it bluntly: Anthropic “has its own AI-powered office suite now.” The new tools join documents, slides and design features Anthropic already offers. OpenAI rolled out its own set of workplace tools a few weeks ago, TechCrunch noted, and Meta is pushing its own agent that builds small apps on the fly.

For decades, the office meant Word, Excel and PowerPoint, or Google’s versions of them. The bet from the SI companies is that the next office will not be a set of programs you open. It will be an assistant you talk to, one that is in the meeting, on the whiteboard and inside the spreadsheet at the same time, carrying the same context from one to the next.

If that bet pays off, the person who used to spend Friday afternoon typing up meeting notes gets that afternoon back. The trade is that an SI hears a lot more of what goes on at work. Anthropic has drawn some lines on who it listens to. Companies will have to decide for themselves whether those lines are enough.