🧰 Claude now ships 43 ready-made workflows for your business
Plus a correction — we said Jev was a year away. It was five days.
Three-minute read.
First up: Claude now ships 43 ready-made workflows for the jobs you keep doing yourself. Then a correction we owe you, a date for whoever runs your Microsoft account, two short lines, one thing that is coming but not yet, and a border guard who has to spot the robots.
ANTHROPIC 🧩
Forty-three ready-made workflows for the jobs you keep doing yourself
What changes. Claude for Small Business now carries 43 workflows and 37 connectors into software owners already run — QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, Shopify, HubSpot, Gmail, Slack, Gusto. Not features: written instructions for ordinary jobs. A Monday brief on cash, sales and pipeline. Chasing overdue invoices. Answering an enquiry that lands at 9pm. Turning a sales call into a proposal. Closing the month. (claude.com)
What it means at your size. The hard part was never the model, it was knowing what to point it at. Someone has now written that down for the jobs most owners actually do, which removes the blank page that stops this at the first attempt.
The first step. It runs in Claude Cowork, the desktop app. Type /smb-onboard, connect one tool, run the Monday brief once. Not ready to hand over your accounts? Upload a spreadsheet and it builds the brief from that. Anthropic is also running a free session per connector, starting with Notion on 25 September.
The limitation. The workflows start general, so the first outputs read like a competent stranger’s until you spend a session teaching it your format and your priorities. By default Claude waits for your approval before anything sends, posts or pays; leave that alone. The owner stories published alongside are testimonials, not evidence. We have not run these on a client account.
CORRECTION ⚡
We said Jev was a year away. It was five days.
On Friday we put Jev in the “too early” slot and said note the name, move on. It opened to everyone on 20 September, the waitlist is gone, and it is free on Vercel’s AI gateway until 25 September. We misread it, and the signal we ignored was in the same week: LangChain and Vercel had already shipped support.
Plainly: it reads one thing and says which pile it belongs in, with a confidence score, in under a second, for pennies. It cannot write. It sorts. Put it in front of any stack you currently read one item at a time — enquiries, applications, tickets, invoices, reviews. Two caveats stand: it is wired in by whoever builds your automations rather than switched on in an app, and a confident answer can still be a wrong one. It sorts; it does not decide. (typesafe.ai)
MICROSOFT WORD 📄
ChatGPT turns itself on inside Word on 1 October
OpenAI’s Office add-in puts ChatGPT in a sidebar in Word, on every plan including Free, and from 1 October it is on by default rather than something a person installs. Decide before the date: your Microsoft 365 admin allows it and you tell people what not to paste in, or the admin blocks it. Doing nothing picks the first. It sees only the open document, and it draws on the same token allowance as the other premium features. (help.openai.com)
THE REST 📋
The rest of the week, one line each.
- 🔗 Gemini now talks to QuickBooks, HubSpot and Mailchimp directly. On by default, Business Standard and above — worth knowing who has it. (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com)
- 🎤 Transcription keeps getting cheaper and better at once. Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 tops the streaming accuracy table at $0.20 an hour. (twitter.com)
TOO EARLY 🕐
Ads in ChatGPT that talk back. OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents: after clicking an ad, the customer opens a labelled conversation with that business’s own agent inside ChatGPT and asks their real questions there before following any link. If it holds, being findable stops meaning a page that ranks and starts meaning an agent worth talking to.
Not yet, though. Selected US advertisers, no self-serve, no pricing. Given how the last item in this slot went, we will say only that nobody outside that test can buy one today. (openai.com)
ONE FOR THE ROAD 🤖
You are a border guard in a world where robots are banned, and the queue is full of them pretending not to be. You get to ask questions and offer a glass of water. Built in 48 hours at this year’s Global Game Jam, mostly by describing it to an AI. Free in the browser. (itch.io)