Claude is the AI assistant we use, recommend, and build on. This is the honest version of "where should a small business start" — including the places you shouldn't.

What Claude is genuinely good at for a small business

Documents. Reading long ones (contracts, tenders, regulations) and answering questions about them; drafting yours (quotes, proposals, policies) in your voice once shown examples.

The repetitive written work. Replying to the same five enquiry types, summarising meetings, turning notes into follow-ups. This is usually the fastest visible win.

Thinking company. Working through a pricing decision, a difficult email, a plan — as a sparring partner that has read everything and pushes back.

Projects with your context. Claude Projects let you load your price list, tone guide, and standard terms once, so every answer starts from your business rather than from zero.

Where to be careful

Anything customer-facing without review. Drafts, yes; auto-sending, no — not until you've built trust and controls.
Sensitive data. Understand what goes where before pasting it. This is covered properly in any decent training, and it's a reason to be wary of one-size-online-courses.
"Unlimited" ambitions. Start with one workflow that happens every week. A second follows a month later. Scattergun adoption is how tools get abandoned.

Learning it: options in the UK

There's a healthy market of one-day Claude courses (typically £300–£500 per person, classroom or online). They're fine for general skills. The structural problem: they teach Claude in the abstract, on example documents, priced per head.

We run it differently: Getting Started with Claude is £395 +VAT for a 90-minute online session — priced per session, not per person, so the whole team attends for the same price. It runs on your real documents and your real weekly tasks, and it ends with each person having one working use-case, not a certificate. A half-day workshop (£750 +VAT) goes deeper for teams ready to build habits.

The honest starting point, though, is knowing which workflow to point Claude at first — which is exactly what the free ten-minute audit with Alice figures out. Start there; it costs nothing and the summary tells you whether a session is even worth booking.

From the AI glossary — the terms behind this article, in plain English: Claude · context window · prompt · hallucination.