Anthropic has upgraded its cloud AI model with new capabilities for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, a strategic move to expand its enterprise footprint and potentially challenge Microsoft’s newly launched Copilot Cowork – which the cloud also partially powers.
The updated add-ins are available for Mac and Windows users on paid cloud plans starting today, March 11.
Anthropic is also expanding how enterprises can deploy the appliance.
Cloud for Excel and Cloud for PowerPoint can now be accessed through a cloud account or through existing LLM gateway routing to cloud models on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry.
This gives enterprises more flexibility to use add-ins within the cloud and compliance setup they may already have in place.
Shared references in Office apps
Starting March 11, paid cloud users on Mac and Windows can access a new beta experience in which Cloud for Excel and Cloud for PowerPoint share the full context of a user’s interaction with an AI model between the two applications – no need to manually copy and paste it.
This means that the cloud can move information, instructions, and work history between an open spreadsheet and an open presentation in one continuous session.
For example, the cloud can write a formula to extract data from an Excel workbook and instantly apply it to a stylish PowerPoint slide in the same session.
“In practice: a financial analyst can ask the cloud to extract comparable company financial information from an open workbook, create a trading comps table in Excel, drop a valuation summary into a pitch deck, and draft an email to the MD – without having to switch tabs or reinterpret the dataset at each step,” Anthropic said in a press release.
This is based on Anthropic releasing a cloud plugin for Excel in October 2025.
Repeatable workflows inside applications
A central feature of this launch is Skills, which allows teams to create and save repeatable workflows directly inside the Excel and PowerPoint sidebar.
Instead of re-uploading references or re-prompting instructions, users can save standardized processes – such as specific variance analysis or approved slide templates – as one-click actions available to the entire organization.
This could include workflows for recurring financial analyses, preparing presentations in a preferred in-house style, or running common review steps that would otherwise need to be rewritten each time as prompts arise.
Anthropic said each skill, whether individual or organization-wide, will work inside the add-ins in the same way as MCP connectors do.
“Workflows that previously lived in the mind of one person become one-click actions available to the entire organization,” the company said.
Anthropic separates these skills from instructions, letting users set consistent preferences across add-ins, such as preferred number formatting in Excel or presentation-writing rules in PowerPoint.
Anthropic is also shipping a preloaded starter set of skills, which includes:
- excel: Auditing models for formula errors, populating DCF and LBO templates, and cleaning up disorganized data ranges.
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power point: Building competitive scenario decks and reviewing investment banking materials for narrative alignment.
Similarly, Microsoft’s new Copilot Cowork capability introduced on Monday enables enterprise users to deploy agents to complete tasks in Microsoft applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.
The software giant openly said it was created in collaboration with Anthropic, which also released its own stand-alone Cloud Cowork application for Mac and Windows earlier this year, which provides a way for the cloud to access, edit, create and move information between files on the user’s computer, at the direction of the user.
Previously, even with autonomous tools like standalone cloud cowork apps, users often had to ask AI to complete tasks at different stages for each application. Now, the cloud maintains a persistent session that reads live data and writes formulas on both apps simultaneously.
Battle of the Enterprise App Agents
Since the launch of cloud cowork earlier this year, Anthropic has been claiming to become the preferred chat and productivity platform for enterprises.
Competitors like Google, with its close collaboration with Google Workspace, which includes Gmail and Google Docs, and Microsoft, with its continued leadership in the Office suite, can bring AI capabilities directly into users’ workflows.
Anthropic didn’t present the new skills feature as an equivalent to the more autonomous, agentic behavior that Microsoft is now pushing with its own Copilot CoWork.
But the release shows that Anthropic is continuing to move beyond chatbot use cases and engage in more structured, repetitive work inside the applications that many business users already rely on.
Anthropic, through Cloud Cowork, Cloud Code and Cloud Model family, has penetrated into the systems of many organizations, using its high performance in coding benchmarks and general knowledge to help computers better navigate and complete knowledge work at scale, faster with higher quality.
OpenClaw, the open source AI agent that has taken the developer world by storm, owes much of its existence to cloud code.
The results are another sign that the battle over enterprise AI is no longer just about which model performs best on benchmarks. It is increasingly becoming what AI tools and systems enterprises rely on to perform real tasks in their existing applications, files, and workflows.
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