5 Ways to Start Using Claude for Your Business

September 18, 2026


AI tools are becoming increasingly capable, but many business owners are still using them in roughly the same way they used them a few years ago: open a chat window, ask a question, get an answer, close it.


That can be useful, but it barely scratches the surface of what tools like Claude can do.

Anthropic has been steadily moving Claude toward deeper business use. Projects can give Claude persistent business context, Skills can package repeatable processes, and Claude's growing collection of connectors can bring it closer to the software and information businesses already use. Anthropic has even introduced a small-business offering built around connectors and ready-made workflows for tools including QuickBooks, HubSpot, Canva, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.


For a business owner just getting started, however, the goal shouldn't be to automate everything.


Start by making Claude useful for one part of your business.


Here are five places to begin.


1. Give Claude Your Business Context


One of the easiest ways to get better results from Claude is to stop treating every conversation like your first conversation.

Imagine hiring an employee but never telling them what your company does, who your customers are or how you like things done. You wouldn't expect particularly good work.

AI isn't much different.


Create a Claude Project for your business and provide useful background information such as:

  • What your company does
  • Your products and services
  • Your ideal customers
  • Your brand voice
  • Frequently asked questions
  • Examples of previous work
  • Important business processes
  • Internal reference documents

Claude Projects are specifically designed to combine chats with project knowledge and custom instructions. That allows Claude to work from information relevant to your business instead of relying entirely on whatever you happen to include in the latest prompt.


You don't need to upload your entire company on day one. Start with the information you find yourself explaining repeatedly.


2. Use Claude for Research


Claude doesn't have to be something you use only after you've already figured out what you want to do.


It can help with the figuring-out part too.


A business owner could use Claude to research competitors, investigate a new market, compare software, organize customer feedback, prepare for a meeting or explore a potential business opportunity.


Instead of simply asking:


"What's the best CRM?"


Give Claude the actual problem:


"We're a 15-person service business. We need a CRM for five salespeople, automated follow-up, email integration and simple reporting. Research the main options and compare them based on our requirements."


The difference is context and specificity. Anthropic's own prompting guidance recommends providing relevant context, clear instructions and examples when appropriate to improve the usefulness and consistency of Claude's output.


You still need to evaluate important information and verify decisions that matter. But Claude can significantly accelerate the process of gathering, comparing and organizing information.


3. Create and Improve Content


Content is one of the simplest places for a business to start using Claude because almost every company produces some form of it.


That might include:

  • Emails
  • Social media posts
  • Blog articles
  • Proposals
  • Product descriptions
  • Sales materials
  • Presentations
  • Customer communications


But don't limit Claude to generating something from nothing.


Often, it's more useful as an editor.


Give Claude an email you've already written and ask it to make it clearer. Give it a long article and turn it into social posts. Provide several examples of your company's writing and ask it to follow the same style.


The objective isn't necessarily to have AI create all your content. It's to reduce the amount of time between an idea and something you can actually use.


4. Analyze Your Business Data


Businesses generate enormous amounts of information that often gets collected without being fully used.


Sales reports. Marketing results. Customer surveys. Website data. CRM exports. Spreadsheets. Support tickets.


Claude can help you interrogate that information.


For example, you could provide a spreadsheet containing monthly sales and ask Claude to identify:

  • Which products are growing or declining
  • Unusual changes
  • Trends over time
  • Possible problems worth investigating
  • Questions the data raises
  • Information that should be included in your next report


The important shift is from asking AI for general business advice to letting it work with information from your actual business.


This is already becoming part of real business workflows. Anthropic recently demonstrated how its own marketing operations team rebuilt a weekly metrics-reporting process that previously took two days into a Claude workflow taking roughly two hours.


That doesn't mean every spreadsheet should be handed to AI. Sensitive information needs appropriate controls, and important conclusions still need human review.


But the data you're already collecting may contain far more value than you're currently extracting from it.


5. Automate a Repetitive Task


This is where AI starts moving beyond occasional assistance.

Look at the things you or your employees do every day or every week.


Maybe someone:

  • Prepares the same report
  • Summarizes meeting notes
  • Researches new sales leads
  • Organizes incoming information
  • Drafts follow-up emails
  • Reviews documents
  • Prepares recurring marketing content


Pick one.


Write down the steps.


Then see how much of that process Claude can handle.


Claude's Skills are specifically designed around this idea: packaging instructions, resources and processes so Claude can perform specialized tasks more consistently. Anthropic is also increasingly combining Skills with connectors so Claude can work across the systems businesses already use.


You don't need to begin by building an elaborate AI agent.


A repeatable workflow that saves 30 minutes every Monday is already useful.

And once that works, you have a blueprint for finding the next one.


Start With One Task


The mistake is thinking that adopting AI means transforming your entire company overnight.


It doesn't.


Pick one task that takes too much time.


Give Claude the context it needs. Test what it produces. Improve the instructions. Decide where human review is necessary. Then use the process again.


Once you've made one workflow genuinely useful, find another.


That's when Claude stops being something you occasionally chat with and starts becoming part of how your business actually operates.

Your Next Marketer Might Need to Code

October 26, 2026
Marketing is becoming more technical. As businesses adopt AI tools, automation and increasingly complex software, a new kind of specialist is emerging: the marketing engineer. For years, businesses have built marketing teams around familiar responsibilities: advertising, content creation, search engine optimization, social media and lead generation. Those responsibilities haven't disappeared. But the technology behind them has become increasingly complicated. Businesses now rely on advertising platforms, customer relationship management systems, email automation, website analytics, e-commerce software and AI tools. Making those systems work together is becoming an important part of marketing performance. That's where the marketing engineer comes in. What Is a Marketing Engineer? A marketing engineer combines marketing knowledge with technical skills. Traditional marketing specialists might develop a campaign strategy, create content or manage advertising budgets. A marketing engineer can help build the technical systems that make those activities more effective. That might involve connecting a CRM to advertising platforms, automating reporting, improving conversion tracking, integrating customer data or developing workflows using APIs and AI tools. The role connects marketing strategy with technical execution. Rather than relying entirely on separate developers, analysts and software specialists, businesses can use technical marketing expertise to bridge those functions. The Problem With Disconnected Marketing Systems Many businesses already have the technology they need. The challenge is getting it to work together. A company might use Google Ads to attract customers, Shopify to process orders, Klaviyo for email marketing and a CRM to manage relationships. Each platform collects information, but that doesn't necessarily mean the information is connected. Employees may still need to download reports, transfer leads between systems, update spreadsheets or manually compare campaign results against actual sales. Those disconnected processes can make marketing slower and more difficult to measure. Marketing engineering focuses on improving the connections between systems. When information moves reliably between platforms, businesses can reduce repetitive work and make decisions using more complete data. AI Search Is Changing How Businesses Get Discovered Technical marketing is also becoming more relevant as AI-powered search develops. Traditional search engine optimization focuses on helping websites appear in organic search results. But customers increasingly use AI-powered tools to research products, compare services and find answers. That has brought greater attention to two related concepts. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on making information clear, accessible and useful for answer-based discovery. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on improving how content can be discovered, understood and potentially referenced by generative AI systems. These approaches overlap with established SEO practices, including technically accessible websites, useful content and clear information architecture. They do not guarantee inclusion in AI-generated answers. For businesses, the practical lesson is that website content and technical structure need to support more than traditional search rankings. Automation Can Eliminate Repetitive Marketing Work Another opportunity is workflow automation. Marketing departments often spend considerable time on tasks that don't require much creative judgment. Downloading reports, updating spreadsheets, transferring customer information, preparing campaign summaries and moving data between applications are common examples. Many of these activities can be automated when systems are properly connected. That doesn't eliminate the need for marketers. It can give them more time to focus on strategy, creative development, customer relationships and improving campaign performance. The objective isn't to automate everything. It's to identify which tasks can be handled more reliably and efficiently through technology. Better Data Can Lead to Better Marketing Decisions One of the biggest challenges in marketing is understanding which activities actually contribute to revenue. A campaign might generate thousands of impressions, hundreds of clicks and dozens of leads without producing profitable customers. Marketing engineers can help businesses connect advertising activity with customer and sales information. That includes improving conversion tracking, integrating data sources and identifying where potential customers drop out of the buying process. The goal is to move beyond reporting what happened on an advertising platform and develop a clearer understanding of what happened across the business. Does Your Business Need a Marketing Engineer? Not every company needs to hire a full-time technical marketing specialist. For smaller businesses, the first step is identifying where disconnected systems, manual processes or unreliable data are creating problems. Consider whether your advertising and sales platforms share information, whether campaign performance can be connected to revenue and whether repetitive reporting tasks could be automated. It is also worth reviewing whether your website is technically accessible, well structured and capable of answering the questions potential customers are asking. Depending on the complexity of the business, these improvements might be handled by an internal employee, an outside specialist or a combination of both. The important decision isn't necessarily who to hire. It's determining which capabilities the business actually needs. The Future of Marketing Is More Connected Creative thinking, compelling messaging and customer relationships remain essential to effective marketing. But those strengths increasingly depend on the technology supporting them. Businesses need systems that communicate, data that can be trusted and processes that allow teams to work efficiently. Marketing engineering represents one approach to bringing those capabilities together. The next competitive advantage may not come from producing more content or launching more campaigns. It may come from building a marketing operation where everything works together.

P&G Rebuilt Its Operations and Saved $600 Million. Here's How.

October 23, 2026
Procter & Gamble didn't simply outsource its support operations. It first rebuilt how they worked, then brought in outside partners. By 2008, its business-services transformation had generated approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. In the late 1990s, Procter & Gamble faced a problem familiar to businesses of almost every size: too many teams performing similar work. Finance, human resources and other support functions were spread across different parts of the company. That meant duplicated activities, inconsistent processes and unnecessary costs. Instead of continuing to expand those departments independently, P&G decided to fundamentally change how its business operated. First, P&G Fixed Its Internal Operations In 1999, P&G began bringing its support functions into a single global organization. Over the following three years, the company consolidated and standardized more than 70 services. It also established shared-service centers to support operations around the world. The goal was to replace fragmented systems with a more consistent and efficient operating structure. Importantly, P&G didn't begin by handing all these functions to outside companies. It first reorganized how the work was performed internally. That foundation would make the next phase possible. Then Came $4.2 Billion in Outsourcing Agreements In 2003, P&G entered into outsourcing partnerships valued at approximately $4.2 billion. Outside specialists took responsibility for selected operations, including IT infrastructure, payroll support, accounts payable and facilities management. Rather than maintaining every capability internally, P&G could rely on partners with specialized expertise, established systems and the scale to manage these activities. But it didn't outsource everything. The company retained control of functions it considered strategically important, including procurement, logistics, IT architecture and technology-driven innovation. This distinction was central to the strategy. P&G wasn't trying to eliminate internal operations. It was deciding which activities made sense to manage itself and which could be handled more effectively by partners. The Benefits Went Beyond Cost Savings One of the clearest examples came during P&G's integration of Gillette. According to P&G's business-services leadership, its established systems and outsourcing partners helped the company mobilize approximately 750 additional people within weeks. The business-services integration was completed in 15 months, a process its leadership believed could otherwise have taken three to four years. That flexibility mattered. P&G could draw on existing capabilities and outside resources without having to build every part of the operation from scratch. By 2008, the company's broader business-services transformation had produced approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. Those savings came from a combination of internal consolidation, standardized processes and selective outsourcing, not outsourcing alone. What Smaller Businesses Can Learn Most businesses aren't managing P&G's scale or negotiating multibillion-dollar agreements. But the underlying decision is surprisingly relevant. As companies grow, they often add employees and departments without reconsidering how work gets done. Over time, the same problems can emerge: duplicated tasks, fragmented responsibilities, rising administrative costs and employees spending too much time on activities outside their core expertise. The first step isn't necessarily outsourcing. It's understanding the operation. Which processes are inefficient? Which functions require direct internal control? Which activities could a specialist handle more effectively? Customer support, bookkeeping, administrative work, creative production and certain technology operations may be candidates for outside support, depending on the business. But outsourcing a poorly defined process can simply transfer the problem to someone else. P&G's experience illustrates a more disciplined approach: improve the system, identify which capabilities are strategically important and use external partners where they offer a genuine advantage. You Don't Have to Build Everything In-House The most important lesson from P&G's transformation isn't that every business should outsource more. It's that growth doesn't require owning and managing every operational function. By combining stronger internal processes with carefully selected partners, businesses can reduce unnecessary complexity and concentrate their resources where they create the most value. Sometimes the smartest way to grow isn't to build another department. It's to rethink how the work gets done. Sources McKinsey & Company, From internal service provider to strategic partner: An interview with the head of Global Business Services at P&G (2008). Procter & Gamble, 2008 Annual Report.