An AI assistant for business is a software agent that watches your connected apps, surfaces what matters each morning, and runs tasks like scheduling, dashboards, or forecasts while asking approval before any risky step. Anthropic's new Claude Duet, launched October 21 as a research preview, is exactly that kind of assistant, aimed at professionals and small business owners.
According to The Verge, Duet runs on Claude Opus 5.5, ships as a standalone iOS and Android app plus web, and gets its own virtual machine with a browser to do work. It inherits memory, skills, and connectors from Claude, and prompts you before sending payments or deleting things, backed by a new classifier that refuses to share data like credit card numbers. Anthropic calls it an early version that still misreads threads and is weaker at personal errands such as booking tickets. Access is waitlist-only for Pro or Max subscribers in the US.
What it changes for a small business
Duet is the first serious horizontal agent from Anthropic aimed at owners rather than developers, so if you were planning a lightweight ops copilot in-house, the baseline just moved. The catch: it is US-only, English-first, and lives in Anthropic's cloud with its own VM, which means data residency, local tools (1C, Bitrix, Russian banks, kad.arbitr.ru), and anything that touches 152-FZ sits outside its reach for now. For those gaps a bespoke agent still wins, like the Telegram-based personal assistant I built around Google Calendar and Tasks, where connectors and hosting stay on the owner's side.
Why it matters: Duet raises the floor for what a small-business AI assistant means - morning brief, app monitoring, approval gates - so when you scope your own automation, start above that line, not below it.
Source: The Verge