Anthropic has launched some big updates for its AI assistant Claude, introducing Microsoft Excel integration and new financial-focused agent skills. It is said to make Claude more useful for professionals working in investment, banking, and research roles.
Claude for Excel is launching in beta as a research preview. It allows users to work directly with Claude inside Microsoft Excel through a sidebar. Within this interface, Claude can read, analyze, modify, and create Excel workbooks. It also tracks every change it makes, providing transparency and easy navigation to the referenced cells. The feature is available to Claude Max, Enterprise, and Teams users, with the company initially testing it with around 1,000 participants before expanding access more broadly.
This Excel integration builds on Anthropic’s ongoing effort to embed Claude into tools already familiar to enterprise users. The AI can now assist in understanding complex spreadsheets, correcting formula errors, populating templates, and even building new models from scratch. By bringing Claude directly into Excel, Anthropic is targeting one of the most widely used applications in financial analysis.
In addition to Excel integration, Anthropic is adding some new connectors that give Claude direct access to live market data and financial information. These include platforms like Aiera, Third Bridge, Chronograph, Egnyte, LSEG, Moody’s, and MT Newswires. With these connections, Claude can access real-time earnings call transcripts, credit ratings, market prices, company financials, and other industry data that analysts rely on daily.
The update also includes six new pre-built Agent Skills designed to automate specific financial workflows. These skills help Claude perform tasks such as building discounted cash flow models, running comparable company analysis, compiling due diligence data packs, preparing company profiles, analysing earnings results, and creating and initiating coverage reports. These capabilities are intended to save analysts time on repetitive yet essential tasks, allowing them to focus more on decision-making and research.
According to Anthropic, the improvements are powered by its latest model, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, which recently achieved 55.3% accuracy on the Finance Agent benchmark from Vals AI. The company says this represents state-of-the-art performance for financial task automation.
