Anthropic now allows its AI assistant Claude to be integrated into Microsoft 365 to give users of Microsoft productivity tools the opportunity to locate content in Word documents, Teams messages and emails in Outlook through the Claude chatbot.
This step is part of the strategy Anthropic is pursuing to make Claude more useful in different areas of work. Thus, Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive to search and analyze documents without the user needing to upload them to the cloud by hand. Anthropic’s Microsoft 365 connector that enables this and other actions is now available to users on Claude’s Team and Enterprise plans. Of course, administrators have to activate the integration before users can connect their accounts.
The Outlook integration with Claude allows the chatbot to access email threads, as well as analyze communications to extract relevant context for its responses. Claude will also be able to search Teams chats, as well as access channel and group discussions, and meeting summaries.
Additionally, Anthropic is launching search for businesses in Claude. It’s a new feature that makes it easier for the AI assistant to search across all of a company’s data sources, from HR processes to communications systems.
The integration between Claude and Microsoft 365 works through the use of an MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector, Anthropic’s open source standard for connecting AI applications to other data sources and applications. Microsoft has adopted MCP and has promised to use it in Windows, as Windows changes to turn computers into PCs with AI with which it is possible to converse, as it announced a few days ago.
Microsoftbesides, has progressively strengthened its relationship with Anthropicand increasingly uses its AI models to improve Microsoft 365 applications. Thus, they are already collaborating on the improvement of Copilot Researcher, Github Copilot, Copilot Studio and a new Office Agent capable of producing Word documents and PowerPoint presentations from the Copilot chat interface.
