We try most of the serious AI tools so our clients don't have to, and Claude, from Anthropic, has quietly become one we reach for every day. This is our honest take: what it's genuinely good at, where it isn't the right answer, and whether it's worth a place in your business.
What it's for
Claude is a general-purpose AI assistant, but the way we think of it is more specific: it's the one we hand the hard thinking to. Long, dense documents. Careful reasoning. Serious writing that has to be right. Code. It's built by a company that has put an unusual amount of effort into making the model careful and considered rather than just fast and confident, and in practice that shows.
Where it shines
Two things stand out. First, it holds a lot of material in its head at once without losing the thread. Give it a long contract, a sprawling report, a big pile of notes, and it stays coherent across the whole thing rather than forgetting the start by the time it reaches the end. Second, its writing has a measured, grown-up tone that suits high-stakes work, the kind where a confident-sounding mistake would cost you. For picking apart something complicated, or drafting something that genuinely has to land, it's often the strongest tool we have.
Where it doesn't
Claude isn't sitting inside your Outlook or your Teams. If what you need is AI woven into the daily flow of email, meetings and documents, that's Microsoft Copilot's home turf, not Claude's. And like every tool in this category, it can be wrong while sounding completely sure of itself. It's a brilliant assistant, not an oracle, and anything that matters still needs a human check. It's the right tool for hard, contained pieces of work, not a replacement for judgement.
How we use it
For us it's the thinking partner, not the inbox assistant. Drafting something careful, reasoning through a messy problem, working across a long document, getting a sharp second opinion before a decision: that's where it earns its keep. We run it on a proper business footing, with the governance set up so nothing sensitive leaks, which is the same advice we'd give anyone putting any of these tools in front of a team.
Copilot is where your work lives. Claude is where the hard thinking goes. Knowing the difference is most of the skill.
The verdict: if your business does real knowledge work (documents that matter, problems that are genuinely hard, writing that has to be right), Claude earns its place, alongside rather than instead of the Microsoft tools your team already lives in. If you'd like your people to actually get the most out of it, that's exactly what our hands-on Claude training is built to do.
