How to Use Claude for Business: Why Most People Are Missing the Real Opportunity
Towards the end of last year, Anthropic announced it had raised $13 billion and had 300,000+ business customers (probably a lot more now, I'd hazard a guess, after the White House debacle).
If you're working out how to use Claude for business, you're one of those 300,000.
Most businesses are still using Claude the way most people use Google - type something in, get something out, move on.
Useful, sure. But not building anything, and not compounding its knowledge.
Just extracting individual pieces, one at a time, and mostly starting from scratch every time they open a new chat.
And then there's a smaller group doing something completely different.
They're not just using Claude, they're building infrastructure around it. And the results are not even in the same conversation.
What businesses spending $100k a year on Claude are actually doing
The report also said that companies spending $100,000 or more per year on Claude grew nearly 7x in 12 months.
Those are the businesses going all in, and it seems to be working for them.
When you're spending $100k a year on AI, you're not just paying for your Claude subscription.
You're hiring people to build the infrastructure around it.
Someone to figure out how it integrates with your existing tools and processes. Someone to write and maintain the prompts. Someone to train the team, check the outputs, refine things over time.
You're building something deliberate, with dedicated people whose job it is to make it work.
How most small business owners are using Claude (and what's missing)
But what about us smaller folk?
When you're running a coaching business or a small agency, you're doing all of it yourself. (Or, more likely, you're not doing it at all, because who has the time.)
You're not really building anything.
You're extracting individual pieces from your AI tool, one at a time, from scratch, every time.
Getting something useful sometimes, but never quite building something that knows your business and produces consistent output without starting from scratch every single time.
How to use Claude for business by building an AI operating system
What I've been building is an AI-powered marketing system for my business.
Claude Projects have their place, but this is next level. An actual system with the full business infrastructure embedded inside it, and it learns and improves over time.
There's a decent amount of work upfront:
- Getting clear on your voice and tone
- Organising your offers, your positioning, how to speak to different audiences for different services.
- The email formats that work (if you want to see what AI-assisted email looks like in practice, I've written about using AI for email marketing here)
- The social post frameworks that get responses
- Client profiles
- The way you like to structure a sales conversation, a proposal, a follow-up.
For example, right now, I'm building something for a client whose marketing has ground to a halt.
She has too many ideas, a problem compounded by AI rather than solved by it.
She has a sense that all the pieces are there, but there's no system to pull them together (a feeling I can relate to, and one that's getting less and less strong as my own AI Operating System gets more dialled in).
As we're working together, it's all starting to click into place.
Her ideas aren't getting lost.
Not only can she find them again, she can stop-start working on things and actually not lose them in the abyss.
Your Google graveyard of ideas? No more, my friend.
How this is different from Claude Projects
For a start, everything lives locally, on your hard drive. You then point Claude at it to work its magic.
With Claude Projects or custom GPTs, your business infrastructure sits on someone else's servers, tied to their platform and their account system.
What I'm describing lives on your machine.
You own it entirely, and it can grow to include everything about how your business actually runs, not just what fits inside a chat interface.
What happens when the next AI tool comes along
Think about how much everyone was scrambling recently to move from ChatGPT to Claude (2026 decision of the White House to ban Anthropic and create contracts with OpenAI).
That's what happens when your business infrastructure sits on someone else's platform.
This system?
You can use Claude or OpenAI, or whatever comes along next. It doesn't matter, because you've built an operating system for your business that isn't sitting on their servers.
It's not a matter of if, but when, because there WILL be a next time.
The AI space is moving fast.
If your entire business infrastructure lives inside a platform's interface, you're starting over every time something better comes along.
If it lives locally, in files you own, you point a new tool at them and carry on.
Where to start without a £100K budget
Enterprise companies have the headcount to build infrastructure, but they also have the bureaucracy, the sign-off processes, and the risk aversion about what AI can and can't touch. Things move slowly.
A small business that builds a proper local AI operating system can move faster, iterate faster, and end up with something really specific to how they actually work.
The good news? You don't need a $100k budget to build this.
If you want to see more examples of AI working for specific parts of a business, take a look at how you can use AI to get clients from YouTube - it's a good illustration of what's possible once the system knows what you're trying to do.
If you're curious what it looks like for your business specifically, get in touch here, or take a look at how I build AI marketing systems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Claude good for business use?
Yes, and it's becoming the tool of choice for a growing number of businesses. Anthropic reported 300,000+ business customers in late 2025, with large enterprise accounts growing nearly 7x year-on-year. The difference between occasional usefulness and real productivity comes down to whether you've built a proper system around it.
Can I use Claude for work tasks?
Claude handles a wide range of work tasks well - writing, research, analysis, content creation, process documentation, and more. The key is getting to a point where it knows your business well enough to produce consistent output without you briefing it from scratch every time.
How does Claude compare to ChatGPT for business?
Both tools have comparable surface-level capabilities. The more important question for business use is where your infrastructure lives. Building locally means you're not locked into either platform and can switch without starting over when the next better tool comes along.
What is Claude Projects and is it enough?
Claude Projects lets you store instructions and files within Claude's interface, which is a useful starting point. For a full AI operating system that covers your entire business, isn't platform-dependent, and grows with you over time, you'll need to build beyond what Projects offers.
Do I need technical skills to use Claude for business?
Not for day-to-day use. Building a local AI operating system using Claude Code involves some setup, but it doesn't require coding knowledge. The main investment is time upfront to get your business context documented and structured properly.