Anthropic spent the summer asking small business owners what they wanted its AI to do next. About a third of them gave the same answer: help me sell. On Tuesday the company responds with 43 new workflows and 27 new integrations for Claude for Small Business, the plugin it launched in May, taking it from bookkeeping and invoice chasing into lead follow-up, proposals and marketing campaigns.

The plugin runs inside Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s desktop app, and has been installed more than 900,000 times since its May 13 launch , according to the company. That first version shipped with 15 workflows and connectors to Intuit QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva and Docusign. The new release adds Shopify, Salesforce, TikTok Ads, Xero, Gusto, Square and Stripe, among others, for a total of 37 partner connectors, and works on every paid Claude plan.

“Many are using AI for chat,” Lina Ochman, Anthropic’s head of small business for the U.S., said in an interview. “They’re very agent and automation workflow curious, and they don’t know where to start.” She calls Claude for Small Business “an agentic starter pack”: more than 40 prebuilt skills, an onboarding step in which Claude interviews the owner about the business, and a default setting that stages every email, post or payment for approval before it goes out.

What 1,000 owners asked for

The new priorities came from the road. Anthropic took the plugin on a ten-city tour this spring, running half-day workshops for more than 1,000 owners, and surveyed the owners who could not get a seat. Ochman, who grew up around the small businesses her immigrant parents worked in and later owned, was at every stop. “What you start thinking about and focusing on is how do I grow my business? How do I make sure I’m following up on my leads?” she said. “And so Claude becomes that marketing and growth consultant and right hand for the small business owner operator.”

One story she brought back: a man who owns a commercial cleaning company came to a workshop with the daughter who is taking it over. It scheduled its cleaners’ routes on paper. With Claude they automated the scheduling first, she said, then rebuilt the routes so the company could fit in more cleanings a day and give more of its cleaners work.

The customers banks did not want

The customers Anthropic is courting are the ones incumbents have historically found hard to serve. Michael Rangel, co-founder of the banking platform Novo, said in an interview in August that big banks treat small firms as an unprofitable segment. He sees the same shift Anthropic is betting on. “AI is like this complete leveling mechanism, which now is going to empower small businesses to move even faster than ever before because you’re giving them the tools and the power, right, of like a 50 person team, you’re giving that to a single person,” he said.

The far end of that curve is a company with no staff at all. Nimrod Lehavi, co-founder of Inevitable AI Group, said in an interview that the one-person software firms his venture studio launches have “many employees, but all of them are created by Claude or OpenAI, like no human employees.”

The bundle has gaps. Meta’s advertising platform, a mainstay of small business marketing, is not among the 37 connectors, though TikTok Ads is. “Meta is not listed on our active Claude directory yet,” Ochman said. Launch partners have to be active on that directory, she said, and Meta will be added once it is. Owners who want it now can ask the plugin’s custom-connector skill to build one, or route through Zapier.

What the product makes cheap is also what could flood everyone’s feeds. A social content engine skill drafts a week of posts in the owner’s voice and stages them for approval. Ochman’s answer to the saturation question is that the skill is trained on the specific business, that a person signs off on every post, and that the owners using it are growing and hiring. She pointed to Rebel Cheese, an Austin plant-based cheesemaker that trained a voice skill on its founder’s writing so a teammate can draft campaigns without her. “Many of our small business owners and myself included think of AI as a great equalizer,” she said.

The flip side of running the books, the leads and the marketing through one vendor is what happens when that vendor says no. Piero Coen, chief executive of Osmo, a Bitcoin-powered neobank that moves remittances across Latin America, had his Claude Pro account suspended in April for “suspicious signals” after he uploaded a travel itinerary and mapped it in Google Calendar, as I reported at the time . “I was suspended for using the product exactly as advertised,” he said then. Ochman said the models and the product carry safeguards against misuse and outside threats, and that false positives are rare. “Sometimes people’s usage does get flagged,” she said. “And so what we recommend is when it does, especially if it’s something like a misunderstanding, please reach out to our support team.” The team “typically has a really quick turnaround time and reinstates a lot of those subscriptions,” she said. Banks, which have their own record of cutting off customers on automated suspicion, still block AI agents from touching the money directly.

Anthropic says half the owners it surveyed named data security as their biggest hesitation about AI. Its answer is that existing software permissions carry over, so an employee who cannot see a QuickBooks report today cannot see it through Claude, and that business data is not used for training by default on Team and Enterprise plans.

The rest of the launch is people rather than software. The tour restarts this week in Boston and runs through nine more cities this fall. More than 150 organizations trained as Approved Claude SMB Trainers will run over 750 workshops in their own communities, 13 integration partners from Notion to Xero are hosting webinars through November, and Anthropic is building a learning series with Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses. A product this new cannot be handed to owners “without helping explain how to leverage it,” Ochman said.