Empowering Enterprises with AI: Anthropic’s Team Plan and iOS App Launch

• Anthropic introduces a new enterprise plan called Team, offering priority access to its generative AI models and enhanced user management controls.
• Anthropic unveils an iOS app, providing access to its AI assistant Claude 3 for real-time analysis of images and seamless integration with its web client.

Anthropic, one of the world’s best-funded generative AI startups with $7.6 billion raised to date, announced on Wednesday the release of its paid plan tailored for enterprises operating within highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance and legal, in addition to an iOS app.

Team is Anthropic’s enterprise plan which offers customers priority access to its Claude 3 family of generative AI models as well as additional admin and user management controls.

“Anthropic introduced the Team plan now in response to growing demand from enterprise customers who want to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities across their organizations,” Scott White, product lead at Anthropic. “The Team plan is designed for businesses of all sizes and industries that want to give their employees access to Claude’s language understanding and generation capabilities in a controlled and trusted environment.”

Team, Anthropic’s new premium plan that complements individual premium plan Pro, promises greater usage per user compared to Pro. Users are able to significantly increase the amount of chats with Claude using this new approach (we asked Anthropic for figures). Customers of Team also gain a 200,000 token (150,000-word) context window along with all its benefits such as early access to new features.

Context windows (or contexts), are defined as input data (for instance text) which a model considers before producing output (typically more text). Models with small context windows often forget their earlier conversations while larger contexts help these models better grasp how data flow throughout an exchange session.

Team is now being equipped with new toggles that give users greater control of billing and user management, with additional collaboration features such as citations to verify AI-generated claims (models such as Anthropic’s can easily exaggerate), integrations with code repositories like codebases or CRM platforms (Salesforce in particular) as well as — most intriguing of all — an Anthropic canvas in order to collaborate on AI-generated documents or projects among team members, Anthropic claims.

Team customers will soon be able to take advantage of Claude 3, which recently entered open beta, by equipping it with tool use capabilities similar to OpenAI GPTs for wide ranging tasks like stock price check or weather report retrieval.

“By enabling businesses to deeply integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows, the Team plan positions Anthropic to capture significant enterprise market share as more companies move from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment in pursuit of transformative business outcomes,” White said. “In 2023, customers rapidly experimented with AI, and now in 2024, the focus has shifted to identifying and scaling applications that deliver concrete business value.”

Anthropic is all talk; but to engage businesses fully it will require substantial efforts on its behalf.

Gartner conducted a recent poll and 49% of companies agreed that AI projects can be difficult to estimate and demonstrate internally, making them hard sells internally. A separate poll conducted by McKinsey discovered that 66% of executives believe generative AI may take years before showing tangible business benefits.

Corporate spending on generative AI is projected to skyrocket. IDC predicts it’ll hit $15.1 billion by 2027 – nearly eightfold more than its total in 2023!

That may explain why several generative AI vendors, most notably OpenAI, are expanding their enterprise-focused efforts.

OpenAI announced recently that over 600,000 users had subscribed to ChatGPT Enterprise; OpenAI also has provided various tools aimed at meeting corporate governance requirements including an enhanced user interface for tracking model performance and quality.

Anthropic has competitively priced its Team plan: $30 per user per month with a minimum of five seats required per subscription plan. OpenAI does not publish pricing of ChatGPT Enterprise; however users have reported receiving estimates between $30 for 120 users up to $60 for 250 users on Reddit.

“Anthropic’s Team plan is competitive and affordable considering the value it offers organizations,” White said. “The per-user model is straightforward, allowing businesses to start small and expand gradually. This structure supports Anthropic’s growth and stability while enabling enterprises to strategically leverage AI.”

Anthropic’s Launch Team begins from an advantageous stance and this bodes well.

Amazon announced in March its $4 billion investment in Anthropic (following Google’s $2 billion commitment). Anthropic is projected to rake in $850 million annually by 2024 — an impressive 70% jump over earlier projections. Anthropic may see Team as its next expansion target; for now however it seems they can afford for Team to develop organically as they strive to convince businesses their generative AI is better.

An Anthropic iOS app

On Wednesday, Anthropic made another noteworthy announcement – its intent to release an iOS app was made known. Given how aggressively they have been hiring iOS engineers over recent months, this comes as no great shocker.

iOS app gives access to Anthropic’s Claude 3, both for free use as well as upgraded Pro and Team access. It synchronizes with their web client, tapping Claude 3’s vision capabilities for real-time analysis on uploaded and saved images – for instance users could upload screenshots from presentations for analysis by Claude.

“By offering the same functionality as the web version, including chat history syncing and photo upload capabilities, the iOS app aims to make Claude a convenient and integrated part of users’ daily lives, both for personal and professional use,” White said. “It complements the web interface and API offerings, providing another avenue for users to engage with the AI assistant. As we continue to develop and refine our technologies, we’ll continue to explore new ways to deliver value to users across various platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality.”