What Is Claude and What Can It Actually Do for Your Business?
Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic. This guide explains what it is, what it can do for your business, and why it is the tool we use every day at Okapi and Co.
This is the written companion to Episode 2 of our video series, How to Use Claude to Grow Your Business.
Let's start with the basics
Claude is an AI assistant made by a company called Anthropic. You may have heard of ChatGPT, which is made by OpenAI. Claude is its main rival, and for business use, it is the tool we reach for every day at Okapi and Co.
At its most basic, Claude is a chat tool. You type something, it responds. But that description seriously undersells what it can actually do.
What Claude can help you with
Here is a practical list of what Claude handles well:
- Writing copy for your website, emails and social media
- Analysing data and summarising documents
- Planning a marketing strategy
- Drafting proposals, reports and presentations
- Researching keywords for your SEO
- Answering questions about your business in plain English
But here is the part that really changed how we work.
The problem Claude solves that most people do not talk about
Most business owners are juggling too many systems. Your accounts are in one place. Your customer data is somewhere else. Your website analytics live in another tab. Your email marketing tool has its own dashboard, its own login, and its own language.
Getting a clear picture of what is actually happening in your business means opening five different things and trying to join the dots yourself.
Claude can change that.
By connecting Claude to your different tools and data sources, you can start asking plain English questions across all of that information at once. Questions like:
- What were my best performing pages last month?
- Which customers have not ordered in the past 90 days?
- Where is most of my revenue actually coming from?
This is what people mean by a single source of truth. Instead of jumping between systems, you have one conversation where you can question your own business data and get straight answers.
What about Claude Code?
This is where things get genuinely exciting.
Claude Code is a version of Claude that can write and run code on your computer. Before you switch off, here is the important part: you do not need to know how to code. You direct Claude Code in plain English. It can build tools, automate repetitive tasks, create reports, and even build entire websites.
We cover Claude Code properly in Episode 5. But it is worth knowing it exists from the start.
Is Claude better than ChatGPT?
Honestly, both are capable tools and the gap between them shifts regularly as both companies release updates. For the kind of business use we teach, including content writing, analysis, following detailed instructions and connecting to other tools, we find Claude performs very well. Try both and see what fits your workflow.
What to do next
Episode 3 covers exactly how to get started with Claude, step by step. The full video series is dropping very soon.
If you would prefer to learn in person, we run small-group AI workshops for business owners across the south of England.
Book a place on one of our in-person AI workshops, or watch for Episode 3 landing shortly.