Anthropic Expands Claude to Cover Investment Banking

Anthropic’s Claude is moving into the human resources, design and investment banking fields, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Feb. 24).

The artificial intelligence startup announced the expansions of its chatbot Tuesday during a livestream event, the report said. The rollout comes weeks after Anthropic triggered stock market turmoil with the launch of new tools that raised questions about whether AI could make entire business types obsolete.

During the livestream, Anthropic said it will let business customers tailor plug-ins to meet their organizations’ standards, according to the report. Many of Anthropic’s new customization offerings are aimed at the finance industry, with new plugins designed for areas like financial analysis, private equity and wealth management.

Anthropic and competitor OpenAI have spent much of the last year working on AI tools to streamline various professional tasks, efforts that have shaken Wall Street over the past few weeks, the report said.

Several cybersecurity software companies saw their share prices fall last week following Anthropic’s launch of new security capabilities for Claude, for example.

Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude AI models, said, per the Bloomberg report, it’s a “little bit of an overreach or overreaction” to tie market behavior to a single product release, and the company’s AI tools are helping its business clients grow.

Meanwhile, although bigger enterprises “are treating AI as a moonshot for enterprise-wide transformation, middle-market companies have more practical … outcomes in mind,” PYMNTS reported Tuesday.

These medium-sized firms, which account for one-third of GDP and private sector employment in the United States, don’t have multimillion-dollar AI labs or large data science teams.

That means their chief financial officers are interested in how the technology can do the heavy lifting of corporate finance, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “What Happens When CFOs Get Serious About Gen AI.”

The report found that 87% of CFOs at mid-market companies are turning to AI to handle financial reporting work, which can drag out reporting cycles. These tasks include “extracting often-messy data across multiple systems, flagging anomalies for human review and churning out management narratives,” PYMNTS reported Tuesday. “The result? Faster, cleaner statements with less of the exhausting scramble.”

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