Anthropic adds AI to your favourite work tools

Anthropic just launched ‘Integrations’ for Claude that enables the AI to talk directly to your favourite daily work tools. In addition, the company has launched a beefed-up ‘Advanced Research’ feature for digging deeper than ever before.

Starting with Integrations, the feature builds on a technical standard Anthropic released last year (the Model Context Protocol, or MCP), but makes it much easier to use. Before, setting this up was a bit technical and local. Now, developers can build secure bridges allowing Claude to connect safely with apps over the web or on your desktop.

For end-users of Claude, this means you can now hook it up to a growing list of popular work software. Right out of the gate, they’ve included support for ten big names: Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence (hello, project managers and dev teams!), the automation powerhouse Zapier, Cloudflare, customer comms tool Intercom, plus Asana, Square, Sentry, PayPal, Linear, and Plaid. Stripe and GitLab are joining the party soon.

So, what’s the big deal? The real advantage here is context. When Claude can see your project history in Jira, read your team’s knowledge base in Confluence, or check task updates in Asana, it stops guessing and starts understanding what you’re working on.

“When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work—understanding project histories, task statuses, and organisational knowledge—and can take actions across every surface,” explains Anthropic.

They add, “Claude becomes a more informed collaborator, helping you execute complex projects in one place with expert assistance at every step.”

Let’s look at what this means in practice. Connect Zapier, and you suddenly give Claude the keys to thousands of apps linked by Zapier’s workflows. You could just ask Claude, conversationally, to trigger a complex sequence – maybe grab the latest sales numbers from HubSpot, check your calendar, and whip up some meeting notes, all without you lifting a finger in those apps.

For teams using Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Claude could become a serious helper. Think drafting product specs, summarising long Confluence documents so you don’t have to wade through them, or even creating batches of linked Jira tickets at once. It might even spot potential roadblocks by analysing project data.

And if you use Intercom for customer chats, this integration could be a game-changer. Intercom’s own AI assistant, Fin, can now work with Claude to do things like automatically create a bug report in Linear if a customer flags an issue. You could also ask Claude to sift through your Intercom chat history to spot patterns, help debug tricky problems, or summarise what customers are saying – making the whole journey from feedback to fix much smoother.

Anthropic is also making it easier for developers to build even more of these connections. They reckon that using their tools (or platforms like Cloudflare that handle the tricky bits like security and setup), developers can whip up a custom Integration with Claude in about half an hour. This could mean connecting Claude to your company’s unique internal systems or specialised industry software.

Beyond tool integrations, Claude gets a serious research upgrade

Alongside these new connections, Anthropic has given Claude’s Research feature a serious boost. It could already search the web and your Google Workspace files, but the new ‘Advanced Research’ mode is built for when you need to dig really deep.

Flip the switch for this advanced mode, and Claude tackles big questions differently. Instead of just one big search, it intelligently breaks your request down into smaller chunks, investigates each part thoroughly – using the web, your Google Docs, and now tapping into any apps you’ve connected via Integrations – before pulling it all together into a detailed report.

Now, this deeper digging takes a bit more time. While many reports might only take five to fifteen minutes, Anthropic says the really complex investigations could have Claude working away for up to 45 minutes. That might sound like a while, but compare it to the hours you might spend grinding through that research manually, and it starts to look pretty appealing.

Importantly, you can trust the results. When Claude uses information from any source – whether it’s a website, an internal doc, a Jira ticket, or a Confluence page – it gives you clear links straight back to the original. No more wondering where the AI got its information from; you can check it yourself.

These shiny new Integrations and the Advanced Research mode are rolling out now in beta for folks on Anthropic’s paid Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. If you’re on the Pro plan, don’t worry – access is coming your way soon.

Also worth noting: the standard web search feature inside Claude is now available everywhere, for everyone on any paid Claude.ai plan (Pro and up). No more geographical restrictions on that front.

Putting it all together, these updates and integrations show Anthropic is serious about making Claude genuinely useful in a professional context. By letting it plug directly into the tools we already use and giving it more powerful ways to analyse information, they’re pushing Claude towards being less of a novelty and more of an essential part of the modern toolkit.

(Image credit: Anthropic)

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