ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Anthropic released new features for paid accounts.
- They mimic popular Google Workspace tools.
- One lets Claude participate in meetings and take action in real time.
Anthropic often refers to its Claude agent as your coworker. Soon, the company said, it will be able to join your meetings like one, and start working on the tasks you and your team are discussing live.
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“Claude Meetings will let you add Claude to a call to take notes and update the documents your team is working on during the conversation,” Anthropic said. The feature, which will be available for Team and Enterprise plans, theoretically goes beyond something like Gemini’s Google Meet transcription and note-taking, which identifies action items but doesn’t proactively contribute to them.
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In material shared with ZDNET prior to the launch, the company said Claude “won’t join a call with outside guests unless an admin allows it, and it leaves if one joins anyway.” The company also said Claude Meetings will be on by default for Team plans, but Enterprise admins will be able to choose who gets it. The feature won’t work for organizations with “zero data retention (ZDR), HIPAA-ready configuration or customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK).”
Whiteboard, Sheets, and Data
To further keep as much of your work ecosystem within the Claude universe, Anthropic released a new Whiteboards feature in beta.
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“Now, you can talk through a messy plan out loud with Claude, and Claude can turn it into a board with a timeline with owners and dates, so you and your team can collaborate in real time,” Anthropic said. Claude will group crowdsourced notes into themes and action items. Maybe double-check the results of that spew before locking anything in.
After brain-dumping like you might on a physical whiteboard, Anthropic said, Claude can turn that output into a deck or document, or export it to other tools for next steps.
A new Sheets feature is exactly as it sounds: Claude can now create shareable spreadsheets from a prompt and edit inside cells with trackable changes. But it’s not fully replacing the old guard of spreadsheets just yet.
“When you need the full functionality of Excel, you can export your file to .xlsx or CSV, or use Claude for Excel,” Anthropic said. “You can also continue working in partner tools including Airtable, Asana, monday.com, and Smartsheet.”
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Claude Dashboards, which only launched in beta last month, is now called Data. The tool can query company data from large external services such as Amazon Redshift and ClickHouse and comes with tracked changes and faster loading thanks to caching. According to Anthropic, it’s intended to let companies standardize metrics to avoid having conflicting data, surface data stories, and create a live source of truth everyone can access.
“With live sharing, your colleagues can see up-to-date numbers when they open a shared dashboard, even if they don’t have access to the connectors that keep that data current. Viewers see the results of the queries you’ve approved, and can’t run others with your access,” the company said.
Anthropic said that for Team plans, all three features are on by default. For Enterprise plans, only Claude Data will be on by default starting Nov. 19. Whiteboards and Sheets are off by default, though you can adjust those settings in Artifacts.
AI and work software
Anthropic has maintained a lead over OpenAI by focusing on enterprise clients first, while OpenAI has prioritized several consumer products. Releases like this are unsurprising, as they serve Anthropic’s primary base. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are increasingly branching into workplace and productivity software for large-scale companies. That said, Anthropic’s recent release of a personal finance tool rivals OpenAI’s existing equivalent geared toward consumers.
Also: Claude’s new Personal Finance tool aims to help analyze your spending
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
In September, at its Dev Day, OpenAI released ChatGPT Space, which houses document and slide creation tools reminiscent of Google Workspace. Before that, Anthropic had similarly consolidated its document and slide creation features into a single hub.
If there’s a slight differentiator here versus Google Workspace, it’s interface seamlessness. Anthropic has designed Claude itself as the starting point for a range of workplace deliverables, rather than maintaining distinct applications that can quickly feel siloed.
