Anthropic just made a very smart enterprise move — and it’s the kind of product shift that looks small until you realize what it changes.
This week, the company announced that Claude can now run interactive workplace apps directly inside the chatbot interface. Instead of using Claude like a separate “ask a question, copy the answer, paste it somewhere else” tool, you can now pull work tools into the conversation itself — including Slack, Figma, Canva, Box, and Clay, with Salesforce reportedly coming soon. On paper, that might sound like a convenience feature. In practice, it’s a real push to turn Claude into a productivity hub — the place where work happens, not just where ideas get generated.
The real win here is friction. Most knowledge work is still a constant bounce between tools: messaging in Slack, files in Box, design in Figma, a little bit of everything in Canva, and then back again. Every time you switch apps, you lose momentum. And that’s quietly been one of the biggest reasons “AI at work” hasn’t fully clicked yet — people might love the output, but they don’t love the extra step of leaving their workflow to go ask for it. Anthropic is essentially trying to remove that step. If Claude can open the tool you need, interact with it, and help you do the task right there in the same thread, the assistant stops feeling like a separate destination and starts feeling like part of the workflow.
This is also a clear shot at OpenAI, which has been building a similar “Apps” ecosystem inside ChatGPT. But Anthropic’s angle feels more explicitly enterprise-first. This feature isn’t for casual users messing around. It’s for teams who live inside these tools all day and want their AI assistant embedded directly into the workday. And the bigger story is where this is headed: agents.
Anthropic is tying all of this to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard it introduced in 2024 — the same foundation that’s powering these integrations. That matters because it’s not just about adding a handful of apps. It’s about making Claude extensible across the tools companies already rely on.
Then there’s the wild card: Cowork. Anthropic recently introduced Cowork as a more powerful “agent” system built for multi-step tasks — the kind of work that goes beyond answering questions and starts looking more like completing projects. The company says these new interactive apps will soon work with Cowork, which is where things get genuinely interesting (and a little risky).
Once an agent can access tools like Slack, Box, and Figma, it’s easy to imagine the next step: pulling files, analyzing them, updating assets, messaging teammates, and executing workflows automatically. That’s incredibly powerful. It’s also exactly why Anthropic is being cautious about permissions and guardrails. The more access you give an AI system, the more useful it becomes — and the more damage it can do if it makes a mistake. An agent with Slack access can send the wrong message to the wrong person. An agent with file access can grab or delete something it shouldn’t. The productivity upside is massive, but so is the potential for “oops.” That’s the real tension in enterprise AI right now. Everyone wants the assistant that actually does the work — not just summarizes it — but companies still need the safety rails to match the ambition.
For Anthropic, this launch is a bigger statement than it might look at first glance. It’s not just “Claude now has integrations.” It’s a bet that the future of work AI is less about a standalone chatbot and more about an assistant that lives inside everything you already use — messaging, design, docs, storage, and eventually automation.
And in a world where Microsoft is pushing Copilot across Office, and Google is weaving Gemini into Workspace, the competitive battle isn’t just whose model is smartest anymore. It’s who becomes impossible to remove once they’re embedded into the workflow.
This analysis is based on reporting from techbuzz.
Image courtesy of Anthropic.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
