Claude for business: capabilities and applications

What is Claude?

Claude is an AI assistant from the American company Anthropic. Like ChatGPT, Claude works in plain language: you give it an instruction, optionally share documents, and get back a piece of text, an analysis, a summary or code. You use Claude through the claude.ai website, the desktop apps and the mobile apps. Organisations building their own applications can also use the models through the API or through the cloud platforms of Amazon (AWS Bedrock), Google (Vertex) and Microsoft (Foundry).

As of October 2026, Anthropic’s pricing page lists the Fable, Opus, Sonnet and Haiku models in its plan comparison. Which ones you can use, and how much, depends on your plan. The context window, the amount of text Claude can take in at once, runs up to 1 million tokens according to Anthropic, depending on the model. That makes Claude well-suited to work with long documents.

Anyone searching for “Claude for business” will also come across the name “Claude for Work.” Anthropic uses that name in its help articles for the business products; the plans themselves are called Team and Enterprise.

Business options

Claude has personal plans (Free, Pro and Max) and business plans (Team and Enterprise). Only the business plans are suitable for use with company data. On the personal plans, model training on your conversations is “opt-out” according to the pricing page: the user has to turn it off themselves. On Team and Enterprise, Anthropic doesn’t train on your content by default.

Prices and features, as of October 2026, according to Anthropic’s pricing page (US list prices, exclusive of VAT):

• Team: for 2 to 150 users. A standard seat costs $20 per user per month on annual billing or $25 on monthly billing; a premium seat with five times the usage, $100 or $125. Includes SSO, domain verification, central admin, connector management, usage analytics and organisation-wide skills.
• Enterprise: $20 per seat per month on annual billing, plus usage at API rates. According to the Enterprise page, this runs on an annual contract with a minimum of 20 seats. On top of that come domain capture, SCIM, role-based access, audit logs, a compliance API, custom retention periods and IP allowlisting.

All paid plans include projects, connectors to other apps, skills, Claude Code for programming work, and Claude in Chrome and Microsoft 365. There’s also Claude Cowork: you give it a goal and Claude works independently across your files and tools, with a built-in browser for web tasks. Anthropic states that Cowork and chat are merging into a single Claude, first for Pro and Max and later for other plans.

Where is your data stored? According to Anthropic’s Privacy Center, data from the business products is stored in the US, and processing can take place in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. For European data storage and processing, Anthropic’s page on regional compliance points to the regional endpoints of AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex; Microsoft Foundry is listed there for Europe as “coming soon.” That’s a route for your own applications through the API, not for the claude.ai app. The data processing agreement (DPA) with standard contractual clauses is part of the Commercial Terms; accepting those terms also means accepting the DPA.

Applications

Claude is broadly useful, like other assistants. The applications where Claude’s strengths come through most:

• Analysing long documents. Summarising, comparing and searching contracts, policy papers, tender documents or research reports for specific provisions.
• Writing and rewriting. From a first draft of a note to adjusting tone and length for different readers.
• Working with your own sources. With projects and connectors, you give Claude access to the documents and systems a task needs, so you don’t have to keep pasting things in.
• Delegating tasks. With Cowork you let it carry out a task across several steps, such as gathering information, organising it and putting it into a document or spreadsheet, so you can review the result afterwards.
• Programming. With Claude Code, developers can have code written, explained and changed from the terminal, their development environment or the browser.

The same applies to all these applications as to other AI tools: the output is a draft. The better you formulate the instruction, the more usable the draft. The basics of that are covered separately on this site. And the more autonomy you give a tool, as with Cowork, the more important it is to set out beforehand what it is and isn’t allowed to do. That belongs in your AI policy.

Claude versus ChatGPT and Gemini

I have no commission or partner relationship with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or any other vendor. The comparison below is based on the vendors’ official pages, as of October 2026, not on my own benchmark tests.

The assistants are close on core functions, and the price of a standard seat on Team and Business is the same. The difference is the environment. If you work in Google Workspace, Gemini for business is the obvious choice, since it’s already in your apps; in Microsoft 365, the same goes for Copilot. If European data residency in the app is a hard requirement, ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini through Workspace’s data regions, and Copilot through the EU Data Boundary all offer a route for that. With Claude, that’s currently only possible through the cloud platforms. If you choose Claude, it’s often because of long documents, writing work, or delegating tasks.

The fairest way to choose: have two candidates carry out the same three tasks with your own anonymised examples, and let the people who do the work judge the result. A broader overview of criteria and tools is covered separately on this site. Want a second opinion on your choice? Book a thirty-minute call.