We’re launching Cloud for Small Business – a package of connectors and ready-to-run workflows that put the cloud inside the tools that small businesses depend on – to help small business owners take full advantage of AI and cross off items on the to-do list.
Small businesses account for 44% of US GDP and employ nearly half the private sector workforce, but they have lagged behind larger enterprises in adopting AI. Tools and training are rarely tailored to the way small businesses operate, and as a result their use is often relegated to chat windows. As part of our public benefit mission, we are committed to helping business owners use AI more fully and effectively for their most important tasks.
Cloud for Small Business is a toggle install that lets the cloud work inside the tools small business owners already use: Intuit QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. With these tools, it can plan payroll, close the month, run sales campaigns, chase invoices, and more.
“Small businesses make up nearly half of the U.S. economy, but they’ve never had the resources of larger companies. AI is the first technology that can finally bridge that gap, which is why we’re launching the Cloud for Small Business, along with training and partnerships to make sure AI is visible to the entrepreneurs and communities who need it most. The Cloud for Small Business runs inside the tools owners already rely on, like QuickBooks, PayPal And HubSpot, and the work that piles up after hours, like planning payroll, chasing up invoices, or starting marketing projects, is how people run businesses, and the cloud helps take the late-night work off their plates.
-Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic
how it works
Inside Cloud Cowork, toggle on Cloud for Small Business, connect the tools you already use, and choose a job. Cloud works; You approve before you send, post or pay for anything.
it sends with 15 ready-to-run agentic workflows In finance, operations, sales, marketing, human resources and customer service. This also includes 15 skills built on repeatable tasks The owners told us to drive them at the slowest speed possible.
These include:
- Planning payroll with confidence. Settle your QuickBooks cash position against an incoming PayPal settlement, create a 30-day forecast, rank what’s overdue, and queue up reminders for approval and sending.
- Ending the month with fewer errors. Reconcile your books against settlement, flag what doesn’t match, write a plain-English P&L, and export a close packet that you can forward directly to your accountant through Intuit QuickBooks.
- Taking a pulse on your business. Display your most important business insights on a schedule, on a single page: view your cash position through Intuit QuickBooks, sales trends, pipeline movement, this week’s commitments, and more.
- Running their next campaign. Detect slow-downs in your revenue, analyze your HubSpot campaign performance, draft a promo strategy, and generate assets in Canva to prepare your next send.
It’s an invoice chaser, margin analyzer, month-end preparer, tax-season organizer, contract reviewer, lead triager, content strategist, and much more.
Not only did it not solve my problem, but it also showed me problems I didn’t know I had.
What we thought were obstacles are no longer obstacles. It is powerful. The hours of looking at things that don’t matter are over. I want an entire organization where everyone is using these tools daily.
It is getting rid of what used to be very cumbersome clerical work for more value-added work.
Connect to your stack
Moving through cloud cowork, each connected tool handles a specific task:
- paypal Empowers settlements, invoicing, disputes and refunds all within the cloud.
- intuit quickbooks Along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, it handles payroll planning, monthly closing and cash-flow, and reconciliation work that touches every other system.
- hubspot Drives lead triage, customer pulse and campaign attribution.
- Canva Creates content for each channel, with the ability to collaborate with your team and edit, publish assets, and track performance.
- DocuSign Sends contracts for signature, tracks status, and files the executed copy back where it belongs.
The full list of skills, automations, and connectors is available on the solution page.
Small and mid-market businesses fuel our economies, and for decades, QuickBooks has been proud to be their trusted financial partner. By integrating the agentic AI capabilities of our QuickBooks platform in the cloud for small businesses, we are providing small businesses with AI-powered automation and experiences that allow them to overcome the complexities of managing their finances, accelerate payroll workflows, and generate data-backed insights that help them grow and scale with speed and confidence.
At HubSpot, our mission is to help scaling companies grow with AI. We’ve partnered with Anthropic to create the first CRM connector for the cloud, so go-to-market teams can access their HubSpot context wherever they work. For small businesses, this means getting tailored answers, summaries, and visualizations straight from their customer platform so they can segment smarter, run better campaigns, and drive more leads.
Small businesses need AI that moves at their pace. With Canva enabling content creation in the cloud for small business, a business owner can go from idea to published, on-brand design in a single flow, while AI streamlines the work in between. Part of our vision is to simplify complex AI workflows so we can help people achieve their goals through design.
built to trust
We conducted a survey with small business owners, in which half cited data security as their biggest hesitation about AI.
With the cloud for small business:
- You stay in the loop. Every task and workflow you run within the cloud is initiated by you. You approve the plan first or, when you’re ready, let it run from beginning to end.
- Your existing permissions remain in place. If an employee can’t view something in QuickBooks or Drive today, they can’t view it through the cloud.
- We don’t train on your data by default On our team and enterprise plans.
Complete information is in the Trust Centre.
AI flow for small business
Tools in themselves are not enough. Owners and their teams need to know when and how to use them, and most haven’t had the opportunity to learn.
That’s why we partnered up paypal But AI flow for small businessA free online course on using AI to run a small business. It’s taught by owners who have built it into their operations – Prospect Butcher Company in Brooklyn, MAKS TIPM Rebuilders in California, and others – with step-by-step guidance on how to use AI safely, responsibly, and ethically in their business. We’ll cover topics like knowing which tasks in your business are right for AI and how you can get started.
“PayPal is proud to partner with Anthropic to help small and medium-sized businesses harness the full potential of the AI-based economy. Together, we are equipping these business owners and entrepreneurs with the tools, expertise and reliable infrastructure they need to compete and thrive in the rapidly evolving digital economy and creating new opportunities for them to innovate, grow and better serve their customers.” – Amy Bonitatibus, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at PayPal
This course is available on-demand starting today.
cloud smb tour
Starting May 14th in Chicago, we’re taking the cloud on the road for small business. The tour is a free, half-day live AI fluency training and hands-on workshop for up to 100 local small business leaders per stop. Anthropic and partner Tenex.co are hosting the tour, with local partners at each stop. Attendees receive a one-month Cloud Max subscription to start integrating AI into their daily workflow.
Spring stops include: Chicago, Tulsa, Dallas, Hamilton Township, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, San Jose and Indianapolis.
Thank you to the Greater Cleveland Partnership and the National Talent Collaborative for piloting this concept with us in March. More cities will be added in the fall.
Partnership with small business-focused nonprofits
As a public benefit corporation, part of Anthropic’s mission is to ensure that the benefits of AI reach all people and communities, especially those who have historically been last in line for new technology. Small business owners—and the local institutions that finance and advise them—are exactly that audience. So along with cloud for small business, we’re investing in partnerships that put cloud directly into the hands of small business owners and organizations to help them grow.
We believe AI can meaningfully expand what’s possible for small businesses, including solo entrepreneurs. Together with Workday and Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LICS), we are supporting the Workday Foundation Soloentrepreneurship Accelerator Program, which will equip an initial cohort of 15 ambitious solopreneurs in 2026 with seed funding from Workday Foundation, cloud credits from Anthropic, and an AI-first entrepreneurship curriculum developed by LISC.
Small businesses also depend on an enabling environment, including access to capital. That’s why we’re partnering with three community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that are deploying AI in their own operations and services: Axion Opportunity Fund, Community Reinvestment Fund USA, and Pacific Community Ventures. With Cloud Credit and the hands-on technical support of our team, these CDFIs are creating tools that help more small businesses get funded. For example, Pacific Community Ventures is using its Radiant Data Hub – a shared resource for a network of CDFIs – in the cloud to collect and synthesize voice-based feedback from its small business clients and their workers to improve products and services.
launch
To learn more about cloud for small business and access the AI Fluency for Small Business course, get started here.
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