Anthropic launched new features this week that continue its push into the world of knowledge work and business content creation. Claude Sheets and Claude Whiteboards arrived in beta on all paid plans, while Claude Data, previously called Dashboards, became generally available. Claude Meetings, in beta for Team and Enterprise customers, lets Claude join a Google Meet call as a visible participant that takes notes and drafts plans while people are still talking.
These releases build on the Docs and Slides features launched in September, which means Claude now covers most of the file types that make up a working week. Much of the press coverage described the launch as a direct challenge to Office and Google Workspace. Anthropic's own guidance is more modest, since it tells users to export to .xlsx or switch to Claude for Excel when they need a full spreadsheet.
Having tested the main features at ExoBrain, we found them very light but interesting. You can leave a note on a specific cell or slide, ask Claude a small question about it and get a targeted change. That's a better way to work than describing the whole file again in plain chat. Data is useful for building a quick story around figures held in systems such as Snowflake or Salesforce.
Anthropic's illustration of Claude Whiteboards: three people and Claude on one board, with Claude turning their clustered notes into a plan and asking them to correct its draft. Source: Anthropic.
What these tools do well is start a piece of collaborative work, but they cannot yet run it from beginning to end. The gap is control. There is no sophisticated way to configure what Claude should produce or to check that the result matches what you intended. You end up iterating many times instead, which in some cases takes longer than building the sheet or deck yourself.
The more promising direction is in what surrounds these features. MCP apps, richer interfaces inside chat and chat embedded in other products all suggest that the boundary between an assistant and an application is becoming less fixed. Microsoft has spent two years adding an agent to its apps, while Anthropic began with the agent and is now adding apps. Both companies are arriving at a similar product from different starting points, although one with less legacy to work around.
That similarity is the reason to be cautious about treating this as how work will be done. Spreadsheets, decks and whiteboards were designed so that people could coordinate with other people. If agents become able to work together on these tasks, they will not always rely on these formats. Anthropic is trying to compete with Office 365 and Google Workspace in a category that likely won't exist in a few years.
Takeaways: Even after an extension this large, we find Claude's products more coherent than ChatGPT's mix of chat, work and features. The concept that holds them together is the artefact: each new tool produces one, whether a document, deck, sheet, board or dashboard, that people and Claude can both open and change. That is a useful construct for anyone designing AI solutions. We hope Anthropic will in the future let developers define artefact types of their own, which would also help the models learn to create and manipulate them. This central idea could outlast the collaborative surfaces, as multi-agent systems take over work we now do in office software.