What is Claude? A plain guide for UK businesses
Chris Duffy
Certified Chief AI Officer • • 2 Min Read
Claude is the AI assistant made by Anthropic, and UK businesses use it to put AI to work on real tasks. You give it access to a folder, describe the job in plain language, and it carries the work out rather than suggesting how you might. Businesses use it for repeatable work: drafting, research, sorting data, first-pass analysis.
The practical difference is memory and reach. A quick chat answers once and forgets. Claude can also work on the files and folders on your machine and carry a longer task through, the way a new colleague would once you've shown them how you work. Anthropic added this in January 2026 to bring the agentic behaviour of Claude Code to knowledge work rather than coding.
Where UK SMEs get value first: the weekly jobs that eat a day. Pulling information together, drafting the same kinds of documents, tidying data before it's usable. We have run our own business on it since February 2026, and the founder case study shows what that looked like in revenue and hours.
The setup and the first few tasks decide whether it sticks, which is why most people who poke at it alone give up too early. Claude reads real folders on real machines, so the data boundary needs drawing on day one: which folders, whose machines, what stays out.
In the UK, we are a Claude Certified Services Partner in Anthropic's Claude Partner Network. We help businesses set Claude up, train their teams on their own work and govern how it is used. What that partnership covers.
Next step
Get your team using Claude on its own work.
Claude training sets your whole team up on one shared structure, then trains everyone on the work they already do, in person or remote.
See Claude trainingJust you, or two of you? Don’t want to start from a blank page? Start from our foundations. The Founders plugin walks you through building your own set-up with /start, then you get 2 hours with a trained practitioner. See the Founders plugin
Read next: Claude vs ChatGPT for business · Claude vs Copilot · The Claude training day for UK teams · More Claude guides on our Substack · Book a call