£30/month for Copilot. Claude did it for free.

Got a client email Tuesday morning asking for a Q2 summary deck by EOD. Opened Outlook, then Excel, then PowerPoint. Three hours later, slightly frantic. There's a better way now, and it lives inside the apps I already had open.

On 7 May, Anthropic made Claude generally available inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with Outlook following in public beta. Not a new product you have to buy. Add-ins. Free on your existing paid plan. Install from Microsoft AppSource in five minutes.

The part worth your attention isn't the individual apps. It's what happens when you use them together. Claude carries the full context of your conversation as you move between apps. Triage an email in Outlook, open the attachment in Word, build the analysis in Excel, turn it into a PowerPoint deck — and Claude knows what you're doing throughout. You don't explain yourself again. Not once.

Microsoft's Copilot does something similar, but Copilot requires a separate subscription costing around £30 per user per month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 licence. Claude's M365 add-ins cost nothing beyond Pro (£20/month) or Team (£25/user/month). If you're already paying for Claude, this just appeared in your toolkit this month.

Copilot and Claude don't share context with each other — they're parallel assistants running in their own lanes. But you only need one of them. And one of them doesn't cost an extra £30.

This week, KPMG announced it's rolling Claude out to all 276,000 of its employees. PwC signed a deal the week before. These firms didn't do a three-month pilot and a lunch-and-learn series. They just decided.

Meanwhile, the UK Government's own research found that 71% of businesses haven't identified a clear use for AI in their organisation. That number includes a lot of smart people running good businesses who are genuinely confused about where to start.

The confusion isn't stupidity. It's a framing problem. KPMG isn't rolling Claude out because it's exciting technology. It's rolling it out because its consultants spend roughly half their working lives inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — and now those apps just got meaningfully faster. The use case identified itself. Yours probably will too, once you spend a week with Claude inside the tools you already use every day.

All three use Claude for Microsoft 365. Install the add-in from Microsoft AppSource, sign in with your Claude account, and you're live. Requires a paid Claude plan (Pro, Team, Max, or Enterprise).

• Inbox triage before 9am — Open Outlook, ask Claude to sort your unread emails into 'needs reply', 'for info', and 'noise'. It drafts the replies directly in Outlook's compose pane. You hit send or you don't.

• Numbers into a deck in one go — Open your Q2 spreadsheet in Excel alongside a blank PowerPoint. Ask Claude to build a five-slide summary deck from the data. Adjust a number in Excel and the PowerPoint chart updates too. No reformatting.

• Client brief into a proposal — Paste a client email into Word and ask Claude to draft a proposal structure in your usual format. Switch to Excel to build the pricing. Claude already knows the project scope from the email. No re-explaining.

The KPMG announcement dropped Monday morning and the M365 news has been circulating since the 7th. Here's how people are reacting.

Picture this. A client emails Monday evening asking for a Q2 performance summary — with a deck — by Wednesday morning. You've got the data in Excel. You've got a rough thread of context in Outlook. You do not have three hours on Tuesday to copy-paste numbers into PowerPoint and then fix the formatting for another hour.

This is exactly the workflow the M365 cross-app integration is built for. Open the client email in Outlook. Ask Claude to pull out the key asks. Switch to Excel with the data open. Ask Claude to identify the three numbers the client actually cares about. Open PowerPoint. Ask Claude to build the deck from what it already knows — the email, the data, your usual structure. That full workflow, door to door, takes about 25 minutes.

Tuesday afternoon is now free. That's the whole pitch.

Anthropic held Code with Claude in London yesterday. No new flagship model. Just better plumbing. Sometimes that's the more honest product strategy. Back Thursday.