You've explained your brand voice to Claude 400 times.

Had a call with a friend who runs a small consultancy last week. She said she'd been using Claude every day for three months. Also said she'd been explaining her tone of voice to it every single time. There's a fix for that. It's this issue.

On 6 May, at its annual Code with Claude conference in San Francisco, Anthropic unveiled something genuinely different. It's called dreaming — and the name is less whimsical than it sounds.

Dreaming is a scheduled process that lets Claude agents review their past sessions overnight, extract patterns from what worked and what didn't, and update their own memory accordingly. Your agent makes a mistake on Monday. By Tuesday morning, it's adjusted. Without you touching anything.

This is for Claude Managed Agents, which is the developer-facing product — so if you're running claude.ai Pro, this isn't live in your account yet. But the direction is obvious. Anthropic's broader Skills feature (which is in your account) is already doing a simpler version of this: you build an instruction file once, Claude follows it every time, and your outputs stop regressing every time there's a model update.

The context for why this matters: Anthropic's API volume is up nearly 70x year over year. Businesses are building on Claude at a pace the company itself didn't plan for. The question isn't whether AI is being used. It's whether it's getting better over time, or just starting from scratch every session. Dreaming is Anthropic's answer to that at the agent level. Skills are yours, right now, at the business level.

A recent roundup of UK AI adoption data found that only around 31% of businesses using AI report a positive return on investment. Three-quarters see no change in revenue at all. Cue the hot takes about AI being overhyped.

Except the same data shows that 75% of those businesses do report productivity gains. So they're faster, but not more profitable. That gap has a name. It's called using AI as a search engine instead of a system.

You open Claude. You explain your client. You write something. You close the tab. The next day you do it again from zero. That's not AI adoption. That's expensive copy-paste. The businesses reporting actual revenue impact are the ones who've built something that compounds — Skills, Projects, saved context — so Claude doesn't forget everything it learned about them the moment the session ends. The tool's fine. The setup is what's missing.

All available on Pro (£20/month) and Team (£25/user/month) plans. No code. Each takes under 30 minutes to build. Go to Settings → Capabilities → Skills to enable, then ask Claude to build each one using the Skill Creator.

• Brand Voice Skill — Paste in three examples of writing you're proud of, your list of words you hate, and your audience. Claude builds the skill file. Every piece of content you write from now on sounds like you, not like a press release. Start at support.claude.com/skills.

• Client Proposal Skill — Feed it your standard proposal structure, your pricing logic, and two or three winning proposals (redact the names). Ask for a quote or brief — Claude fills in the gaps in your format, not its own. Takes 20 minutes. Saves two hours per pitch.

• Weekly Report Skill — Describe what goes into your Friday client update: metrics you track, language you use, format your clients expect. Build the skill once. Every Friday, open Claude and say "run my weekly report for [client]." Done in four minutes instead of forty.

The dreaming announcement landed loud on Wednesday. Here's what people actually said.

Picture this: you've got a proposal due Thursday. You open Claude, paste in the brief, and start explaining your client. Their industry. Your tone. The three things you never want to sound like. The two phrases you always use. The fact that your proposals always lead with outcomes, not process.

Twenty minutes in, you've written more about how to write the proposal than you've written of the actual proposal.

One practitioner writing about Claude Skills counted it up: they'd explained their writing style to Claude roughly 400 times. Same instructions, different chat window, every time. They spent 25 minutes building a Brand Voice Skill. They haven't explained their style once since.

This is the whole pitch for Skills. Most people use AI the same way every session — type a prompt, get an output, start from zero next time. It works. It just doesn't compound. A Skill is the difference between hiring someone new every morning and having a colleague who already knows how you work. Build one this week. The Brand Voice Skill from the roundup above is the right place to start.

Rereading an old interview with James Dyson this week. He redesigned the same vacuum 5,127 times before the first one shipped. Claude's dreaming feature is trying to do that automatically, overnight. He'd probably find that funny.