Anthropic sold corporate giants on Claude. Now the AI company is in an all-out blitz for the mom-and-pops.
In May, Anthropic launched an AI tool specifically for small businesses. Since then, it says it’s garnered 900,000 installations for the Claude for Small Business plugin and is angling to expand the tool’s reach. It’s planning a new slate of workshops to boost its adoption, and training people to spread the Claude gospel.
As Anthropic prepares for its initial public offering, small businesses present a major opportunity for mass adoption: In the US, they employ more than 45% of the private sector’s workers and account for around 44% of the country’s GDP, according to data from the US Small Business Administration. And the share of small businesses that use generative AI jumped from 23% in 2023 to 58% in 2025, according to a survey by the Chamber of Commerce.
Unlike Anthropic’s coding clientele, small businesses have small budgets — and different demands and anxieties. Small firms are caught between AI sales pitches on one side and backlash against the technology on the other. Business owners told Business Insider they’ve faced concerns from customers for using AI and also found helpful ways to use the technology behind the scenes.
The Claude for Small Business tool handles a range of tasks for small businesses, such as reconciling finances through a company’s QuickBooks account. On Tuesday, Anthropic added new plugins from companies like Shopify, Stripe, and Zoom. Lina Ochman, Anthropic’s head of US small and medium businesses, called the tool “an agentic starter pack.”
Now, Anthropic is creating a cascade of AI-focused workshops and quasi-influencers of the tool. It held its first sessions in San Francisco and New York last week to train people to become “Approved Claude SMB Trainers,” who have to commit to hosting five workshops for small- and medium-sized businesses by the end of the year.
Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI, also introduced a program for small businesses this year, as these labs compete for their share of mom-and-pop shops.
Small businesses say they’ve gotten some backlash for using AI
This spring, Ochman traveled the country talking up Claude’s potential for small businesses, hitting Chicago, Baton Rouge, San Jose, and a slate of other cities. Around 100 business owners attended each of the stops’ half-day workshops.
Ochman said she found that most business owners fell in the camp of chatting with AI tools and not yet letting them automate large chunks of their business. They worried about AI’s accuracy, asked if they risked getting hacked, and told her they didn’t know where to start.
Business Insider also spoke with small businesses using AI tools from both Anthropic and OpenAI. Some say they’ve gotten backlash from customers. Steve Zumoff, who runs a tiki bar in Pittsburgh called Spork Island Trading Co., said he got several one-star reviews on his bar’s Google page because he’d posted an AI-designed sign out front. He said he expects people to get more comfortable with AI over time, adding that he’d used ChatGPT in figuring out the bar’s interior design.
“I have a bag of tools with an electric drill, and that’s taken away a job from a carpenter, probably,” Zumoff said. “I need to research something, I use Google; that takes a job away from a librarian.”
Likewise, a coffee shop owner previously told Business Insider about how she got social media backlash for using ChatGPT to create a menu poster.
Monz Islam, the director of the café Zenchai in Fleet, a town in the UK, posted a photo on the café’s Instagram proclaiming that it wouldn’t use generative AI for posters. He said he’d made the post after younger customers had complained about other cafés’ AI artwork. It feels more “authentic” to have a human-made design, even if they used Canva, Islam said.
Ochman said she doesn’t encourage business owners to use Claude for tasks like banking and legal functions.
“Claude will get you 95% of the way there, but the human and the expert stays in the loop,” she said.
AI-vangelizing Claude
Anthropic is now spinning up a network to hype Claude’s uses for small businesses. It will run more workshops of its own, is promoting sessions held by its partners, and has kicked off a program to train new evangelists with events in San Francisco and New York.
Kelsey Flood, the chief program officer at the California workplace training nonprofit Digital NEST, attended the San Francisco session last week. She told Business Insider she’s hoping to run the AI literacy workshops for other nonprofits, small businesses, and students, and keep them agnostic on which AI model to use. Flood said that, given the vast diversity of small businesses, AI labs need to build these relationships to sell their tools.
“The only way I think for Anthropic to be able to do that at scale is to partner,” Flood said.
Ochman said she wants to see more small businesses become comfortable with AI.
“If they end up choosing somebody else first, that’s OK for me, because a rising tide lifts all ships,” she said.
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