Claude Duet shows what your business can automate

In many businesses part of the day goes into checking. Is every new contract set up correctly in the system? Has a vacancy come in that needs processing? Does a client still need a reminder? Someone checks it and starts the next step.

That work comes back every day, in the same way. That is why automating it seems obvious. Even so, it is hard to hand it over. You do not want a system to simply send an e-mail to a client or delete something. And you want to know which systems it looks into.

On 21 October Anthropic, the company behind Claude, announced Claude Duet. In this new app Claude works as an AI agent. That is AI that does not only answer, but also carries out tasks in other apps itself.

Duet uses the apps you have connected to Claude, such as Gmail, Slack, HubSpot or QuickBooks. Every morning you get a short overview of what needs attention. After that Duet looks into those apps every few hours and only gets in touch when something is going on. Duet works on a computer of its own in the cloud, so your laptop does not have to be on.

Reading, drafting and preparing Duet does by itself. Before it sends a message, pays for something, signs a document or deletes anything, it first shows what it is going to do. Only after your approval does it happen. According to the explanation of its safety, Duet never sees your passwords. Some actions Duet cannot carry out even with approval, such as moving money between accounts. And according to the guide, you start every connection yourself and can disconnect any app at any time.

Duet is a good example of how automation with AI can work. Not because the AI does everything itself, but because the work is divided well. The system checks and prepares. You decide on the steps that matter. And you choose yourself which systems it may look into.

That division also works for a process in your business. The work in such a process is often similar, but not every request is the same. With AI in the automation, the system can deal with what is different each time. You do set out beforehand what it may do and what goes past a colleague first. Those agreements then hold for the whole team.

What that looks like in practice is shown by the automatic link check for Derec, a Dutch staffing agency. Every new contract is checked automatically for a reference to the placement it belongs to. If the reference is missing, administration gets an e-mail. Administration only hears something when there is something to fix.

With AI vacancy processing it goes a step further. AI takes the details out of a new vacancy and writes the text in the house style, but publishes nothing itself. A recruiter reads through every vacancy and publishes it personally.

This approach does ask something of you. It has to be clear beforehand what the system may do and which steps go past a colleague. If your process changes, those agreements change with it. Those agreements are made together, and they grow as the system proves itself in practice.