Anthropic Rattles IT

 The future came calling on February 3 for Information Technology (IT) when valua­tions of the biggest companies in the sector fell by hundreds of billions of dollars. The reason was Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) company, coming out with a new set of tools for its model Claude that threatened to compete with what IT providers were selling. Among the big AI companies, Anthropic has been focusing on enterprise or business customers, avoiding ele­ments like image generation and keeping their offerings sharply on making work more efficient. Claude’s coding skills were already thought to be the best among AI agents.

On January 12, Anthropic launched Cowork, something of an autonomous AI secretary for your computer. And on January 30, it intro­duced new tools into Cowork, which could cre­ate plugins specifically for different businesses and uses. Anthropic gave an example in a blog: “Plugins work for any use case, but they’re espe­cially powerful for tailoring Claude to specific job functions like sales, legal, and financial analy­sis. A sales plugin, for example, could connect Claude to your CRM [Customer Relationship Management] and knowledge base, teach it your sales process, and give you commands for every­thing from prospect research to call follow ups.”

The question then became if AI could do all this for almost free, why pay software-as-a-service companies huge fees for the same thing?