It’s becoming like the iPhone, once the software has access to “Claude”, everyone in the org wants it. Finance wants it for excel, marketing and design for image generation, compliance for working with documents. Sure it’s not software engineering rates, but it increases the user base beyond software developers.
Rings true in my org -- finance is a big consumer because all the software shops who do integration work with CRMs and ERPs are garbage and take forever to implement changes and via some clever prompting, you can obviate most of that work.
One regular workflow is a reconciliation we do for events that we put on — a number of costs that are expensed, a number of costs that are prepaid until the event happens, individual registration revenue that is recognized immediately and then the corporate sponsorships that are often paid in advance but their recognition is deferred until the event happens. Previously since that involved both balance sheet, income statement and CRM reporting, we relied on an integration vendor to write custom scripts to bring all the info (poorly) into our ERP. Since then, we’ve found a tool leveraging LLMs to ‘join’ those various sources and our events people generally described the report they wanted with a template in excel and it readily created that report with “export to sheets or excel” functionality.
A report that previously took ~4 hours per month for a very expensive resource now takes 30s to validate and can be run completely ad hoc by the events managers.
It doesn't really feel like an image model fits with the "theme" of Anthropic's products.
I see Claude as much more of a productivity tool than say, ChatGPT, so if they were to release an image model, I would expect it to be useful for presentations etc. But, then the images need to be more like infographics, which are difficult for an image model to get right. On the other hand, they are much easier for a strong coding model to implement, while also allowing users to make controlled edits.
It's interesting. Until quite recently image models felt like toys, and Anthropic opting out seemed like a good decision to me. I feel like the "trained on stolen data" thing feels a lot more real with image models, since they so clearly compete with the artists whose work was used - so it felt aligned with Anthropic's image as the "more ethical" of the labs.
But then Nano Banana happened, and ChatGPT Images 2.0, and now image models aren't a toy any more - you can get real, useful work done with them.
Which is a problem for Anthropic, because companies that are buying a suite of AI tools for their employees may well value the ability to create usable posters, leaflets, and most importantly presentation slides.
Anthropic don't have anything to offer there, where Google and OpenAI have two of the best models anywhere.
I've seen plenty of people at my job that have tried to spice up their research seminar slides with some chatGPT-generated images, the only time they don't suck is when someone uses the images as a joke. There's always something blatantly off, such that the output is only usable for informal seminars. On the other hand, the approach of having an LLM produce a python script, or write out a PPTX directly with placeholders and "vector" flowcharts etc, is now a very common approach for us.
Focusing on improving the inline visualization feature and Claude design, which were both recently introduced, will likely make more money and be more helpful than building an image model and competing with the very good ones Google and OpenAI have.
