AI agents spent years as a concept and then as an experiment. Now, AI companies are devoting even more time and resources than before to make their agents actually useful for end users, whether they\u2019re consumers or professionals.<\/p>\n
Anthropic on Thursday announced its next step toward that goal: Skills for Claude. The tool is made up of \u201cfolders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed to make it smarter at specific work tasks \u2014 from working with Excel [to] following your organization\u2019s brand guidelines,\u201d per a release. People can also build their own Skills for Claude relative to their specific jobs and use them across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Anthropic\u2019s API, and the Claude Agent SDK. Box, Rakuten, and Canva have already used the tool, according to the release.<\/p>\n
Essentially, the feature is designed to improve Claude\u2019s AI agent capabilities for your work specifically, so you don\u2019t have to spend as much time writing the perfect prompt or referring to past context every time you\u2019re trying to accomplish a task. It\u2019s available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users.<\/p>\n
Brad Abrams, a product lead at Anthropic, told The Verge that \u201cthe thing that\u2019s interesting to me about Skills is basically about agents.\u201d He said that Skills as a feature essentially provides organizations building agents a way to teach Claude to do a good job \u201cin their specific context.\u201d He emphasized that it\u2019s not about meeting arbitrary benchmarks \u2014 it\u2019s about being able to do the task you need at your own company.<\/p>\n
Using an Anthropic layer on top of Claude\u2019s PowerPoint Skill, \u201cI had Claude create me a presentation about how Haiku 4.5 is doing in the market,\u201d Abrams said, adding that Claude created \u201cwell-formatted slides that are easy to digest.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and others have been working toward the goal of actually useful AI agents for years, with executives regularly bringing up agentic AI on earnings calls and redirecting internal resources toward building the tools. To date, though, progress has been largely incremental<\/a>, with companies fighting to release new feature updates or iterations of agents. (Think: Anthropic\u2019s Computer Use \u2014 or OpenAI\u2019s Operator, then Deep Research, and then ChatGPT Agent, which essentially combined the two.)<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s news also follows an OpenAI announcement in the same realm earlier this month at the company\u2019s annual DevDay event.<\/p>\n At the event, OpenAI unveiled AgentKit, a group of tools executives said were \u201cdesigned to help you take agents from prototype to production\u201d and targeted both big companies and individual developers. The example use case OpenAI demonstrated was Albertsons, which runs more than 2,000 US grocery stores, using a custom agent with custom data to create a plan to improve ice cream sales if they were down more than 30 percent. Box, Canva, Evernote, and Ramp were also mentioned as having tried the tool. OpenAI also announced a consumer-facing tool<\/a> that allows people to work with apps inside ChatGPT, like Zillow and Uber Eats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI agents spent years as a concept and then as an experiment. Now, AI companies are devoting even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,2729,254,255,64,63,44,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-218922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-au","13":"tag-australia","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}