“How do we use Claude AI?” That is a question that more business leaders are asking, and one fewer can answer with any real specificity. Across 100,000 real-world Claude conversations, Anthropic Economic Index (2026) found that AI cuts task completion time by an estimated 80%. But you can only get that sort of result if the people using it know how to set it up correctly. We’ve been running Claude at Teal across sales, marketing, and operations, and this is what we’ve found works.
Key Takeaways
- Memory, projects, and skills are the three settings that separate consistently good output from generic responses.
- Cowork is the interface where most business users should spend their time because it handles longer, multi-step tasks and stays connected to your files and tools.
- Claude performs better the more context it has; setting it up to know how you work is a must-have foundation.
- Letting employees use AI without guardrails is a financial risk.
Table of Contents
What is Claude AI good for in a business setting?
Claude AI is best suited for sustained, multi-step work that benefits from context over time – drafting, research synthesis, content creation, client preparation, and workflow automation. It handles tasks that require reasoning over large amounts of input material better than most tools in its class.
Eight of the Fortune 10 are now Claude customers, and the number of organizations spending over $100,000 annually on Claude grew 7x in the past year, according to Anthropic.
For business leaders still evaluating whether using an AI solution is good for work, that data point answers the question.
How do you set up Claude AI the right way?
1. Turn on memory so Claude improves over time.
Contrary to what some might tell you, the right first step when you open Claude is to go into settings. In the lower left corner, click your name, go to Settings, then navigate to Capabilities.
The two toggles you want to turn on immediately are:
- 1. “Search relevant past chats”
- 2. “Generate memory from your chat history”
This matters more than most new users expect. Teal’s CITO and cofounder, Reid Johnston, explains it this way:
Memory is how Claude improves over time without you re-explaining your context in every session.
2. Give Claude global instructions for how to behave.
Once your memory is set up, you’ll want to write your global instructions. These tell Claude who you are, what role you want it to play, how you want output formatted, and – this part is important – that you do not want it to agree with you just to be agreeable.
Building in explicit “push back on me” language turns Claude from a “yes” machine into something closer to a useful thinking partner.
3. Choose your model version based on the task difficulty level.
After you have your instructions all set up, it’s time to choose your model version.
The default is Sonnet 4.6 and is a faster model that is used for everyday tasks.
Opus 4.7 is more capable, takes longer, and uses more of your credits. It’s perfect for complex, long-running tasks.
For complex business reasoning, using Opus 4.7 with “adaptive thinking” turned on is worth the additional processing time. Those types of tasks may include:
- Drafting proposals
- Synthesizing research
- Preparing for important conversations
What is the difference between Claude’s chat and Cowork modes?
Chat is for quick, back-and-forth questions. Cowork is for work that takes time and draws from your actual files.
Cowork mode launched in Jan 2026 and explicitly lets Claude connect to a folder of documents, so it can reference them continuously without manually re-uploading each session.
The distinction that matters most for business users is file access. In the browser version of Claude, you attach files to a conversation one at a time. In Cowork, you give Claude access to a specific folder on your computer – a client folder in OneDrive, for example – and Claude references those files in every response without you re-uploading them each session.
Teal co-founder Gar Whaley made the difference clear in a recent virtual event the company hosted on Claude:
For most business workflows, Cowork is where you should be operating – especially if your workflows involve existing documents, client context, or work that spans multiple sessions.
What are Claude projects and why do they matter?
A Claude project is a folder that holds related chats, files, and instructions together. Think of it as a client folder or a campaign folder that Claude can read and act on across every conversation you have within it.
The setup our team has used involves creating a project and populating it with the documents relevant to that work. Claude draws from those files when it responds.
It is not searching your entire machine, just the content you curated for the task. That narrower scope produces more accurate, more consistent output.
Each project also carries its own instruction layer. While your global instructions apply everywhere, project instructions refine Claude’s behavior for that specific context.
You might tell Claude in a client project to always check a notes file for context first, or to follow a particular output format. The result is that Claude starts to feel less like a generic tool and more like a team member who already knows exactly what you need.
What are Claude AI skills and how do they work?
A Claude skill is a documented set of instructions that tells Claude how to complete a specific task in a specific way. Skills are accessible through the slash command inside Claude, and they are among the most practically useful features available.
Reid built his own voice-profile skill by having Claude analyze 50 emails he wrote before he started using AI. Those emails reflect how he actually writes, not how AI would write for him.
So, Claude read those emails, identified the patterns, and turned them into instructions. Now, when Reid types “write this in Reid voice,” Claude is following a documented style guide that his own writing produced. The output sounds like him versus something more akin to a marketing template.
The same logic applies to any repeatable business task:
- Proposal formats
- Client update summaries
- Meeting prep documents
- Weekly reporting
A skill is the difference between prompting Claude from scratch every time and having a workflow that runs the same way every time with a single command.
How do you connect Claude AI to your other business tools?
Claude connects to external tools through connectors, found under Settings → Connectors. The current list includes monday.com, Microsoft 365, Asana, Box, Google Drive, HubSpot, DocuSign, Semrush MCP, and dozens more. That list continues to expand.
What connectors make possible is referencing live data from your existing systems directly inside your prompts.
Instead of exporting a report from HubSpot, saving it, and uploading it to Claude…
…You reference the HubSpot data in the Claude conversation and the AI reads it, reasons over it, and produces an output (a summary, a follow-up draft, a comparison, etc.).
What this means is that you are no longer the manual bridge between your tools.
Here’s what that can look like, from a marketing perspective.
In this example, I asked Cowork to create a dashboard of site audit opportunities derived from Semrush data that our team can work on improving in the upcoming quarter.
It generated a roughly 2-page report with all the pertinent details of where our website sits and the actions we should take. This is a small snippet of the report it generated.
Because I also have the monday.com connector linked to Claude, I then asked it to write/create the tasks to our project management board for us to work through in the coming months.
Claude Cowork created the items, assigned the right person, and the correct statuses to each.
It even broke down the details of what’s needed in the updates of each individual task – all of this was done with a single, 1-sentence prompt.
For organizations operating under compliance requirements, the connector model also raises a governance question worth addressing before rollout.
Claude accessing your CRM through an approved connector is a different data pathway than an employee using a personal AI account to process the same information. That distinction affects your security posture, your data policies, and potentially your insurance eligibility.
The shortcuts that will change how you work day-to-day.
There are two shortcut features Teal uses daily that most new Claude users skip past.
Quick Access Shortcut
The first is the quick access shortcut.
Download the Claude desktop app (not just the browser version) go to Settings → General, and assign a keyboard shortcut, such as Control + ALT + Space.
On a Mac, a double-tap of the Option key works well.
That shortcut opens a small input box from anywhere on your computer. You can type a question into it, or you can drag across your screen to capture a screenshot.
Claude reads whatever is in the screenshot and responds to it. It replaces the copy-paste loop most people are running today between their screen and their AI tool.
Voice Input
The second feature is the voice input.
Claude has a built-in voice shortcut (Teal’s team also uses Whisper Flow, a transcription tool that works across every app and device, not just inside Claude).
The reason to use voice is that AI tools perform better with more context, and most people talk faster and with more detail than they type. The prompt “write me an email” produces a generic response.
However, a 30-second spoken version of the same request – with context on the recipient, the goal, the tone, and what to leave out – produces something you will want to actually send.
Is Claude better than ChatGPT for business use?
For most business users, the better question is which tool fits your existing environment and your type of work.
Teal runs on Microsoft 365, which means Copilot handles M365-integrated tasks. Claude is where the team goes for longer-form reasoning, multi-document work, and anything requiring structured, nuanced output.
Research supports using multiple tools rather than making a binary choice.
Roles augmented by AI tools show a 37% average productivity improvement, compared to 12% from traditional automation alone, according to UC Today’s 2026 AI Productivity Reports.
The return depends on matching the tool to the task.
What matters more than the brand is the setup. A Claude account with memory on, instructions written, and the right project structure in place will outperform a generic session in any AI tool.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that only one in four AI users believes their organizational leadership is consistently aligned on AI strategy, and 65% of users fear falling behind professionally if they fail to adapt.
So, the gap really isn’t in the tools, but rather their adoption.
The governance question you should answer “yes” to.
This is one number that belongs in every budget conversation about AI.
IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that shadow AI (workers using unapproved AI tools without organizational oversight) added an average of $670,000 to the cost of a data breach.
Separately, 63% of organizations that experienced a breach had no AI governance policy in place at the time.
Do you have an AI governance policy right now? You should be able to answer that confidently with a “yes.” Why?
Because your team is almost certainly already using AI tools, whether or not you have sanctioned them.
Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from fewer than 5% in 2025. Adoption is not something you can choose to defer because it is already happening inside your organization.
Getting Claude – or any other AI tool – configured correctly is a risk management decision as much as a productivity one.
The organizations reporting an average of 171% ROI from agentic AI deployments, according to 2026 market analysis from Tech Insider, built that return on a deliberate foundation.
Getting value from Claude AI.
Getting Claude AI set up correctly takes a few deliberate steps like turning the memory on, writing instructions written, structuring projects, and configuring connectors. But those steps are what separate tangible productivity gains from a tool that sits in a browser tab and gets used occasionally.
If your organization is working through AI adoption, explore AI enablement for small and midmarket businesses.
FAQ
How is Claude different from Copilot?
Claude is made by Anthropic and runs on Anthropic’s own models. Copilot is Microsoft’s product family. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot in Windows, and GitHub Copilot are all different tools. At Teal, we use both: Copilot for M365-integrated tasks, Claude for marketing, multi-document work, and longer-form reasoning. They are complementary, not competing.
Is Claude HIPAA compliant?
Free, Pro, and Max plans are not HIPAA compliant. The compliant path runs through Claude Enterprise with a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Regulated organizations should establish a governance policy and approved connector setup before expanding Claude to workflows that touch protected data.
Which company makes Claude AI?
Claude is made by Anthropic, an AI safety and research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (President). Anthropic’s focus is building AI that is reliable, interpretable, and steerable – which is why Claude is designed to push back and acknowledge uncertainty rather than generate confident-sounding answers.
How is Claude different from OpenAI?
OpenAI makes ChatGPT. Anthropic makes Claude. They are separate companies with different research approaches. Claude tends to handle longer contexts and follow complex instructions more precisely. OpenAI’s GPT models have a larger third-party integration ecosystem. For organizations using Microsoft 365, the more relevant comparison is Claude vs. Copilot.
